- Page II -
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 section called ’Results from people in your social circle.’” Your social circle is defined as “Gmail chat buddies, your Gmail contacts friends, family and co-worker groups, and people you’re publicly connected to on other social sites (such as Twitter and FriendFeed)”. A connection to a site like Friendfeed can be done via your Google Profile, so as a side-effect, social search might make that profile a more important location to maintain for users.
Trying to produce this special personal onebox, I entered a couple of terms. “Germany” was one of them triggering a result, as shown in the screenshot above. Indeed, Nicole Simon and Marcus “Mediadonis”, the two people whose content was shown for this query, are people I’ve talked to or personally met in the past. Clicking on the onebox main link, “Results from people ...”, led to a further search which saw me connected to the Dalai Lama, which I so far only met in an Amsterdam wax figure cabinet (along with Hu Jintao).
Instead of waiting for the onebox to appear, you can also expand the search options to the left by clicking “Show options” and then “Social” on results. A list of people will appear, too, so you can further refine. I was again “connected via twitter.com” (which I don’t use in any actual way, and which I didn’t add to my Google profile) to a lot of strangers, which kind of ruined the purpose of this.
I guess it’s an interesting start, with a lot depending on how correctly Google spots your real connections; real, as opposed to forgotten social network pages and such. Another part to the “useful” equation is probably how relevant the social side is to your actual query. I often type queries because I’m solving a specific task – looking for a location, looking for a programming solution, looking up a fact bit etc. – where I have a harder time to imagine social results being useful. I want the “best” result to solve my task, independent of my social circle. Where social search might come in very handy though is when you’re looking for opinions. What do people I know think of new Google product X? How did people like yesterday’s event Z? Often, I head to Friendfeed for this type of stuff. (Though the interesting part about blocked-here-in-China Friendfeed is that it’s not specifically about people you’ve met or who know you but about people whose opinions you might find particularly interesting or challenging... there’s an overlap, but those two aren’t the same.)
On a side-note, it’s worth noting that what Google Social Search does not do, apparently, is include private content on web results – like results from your Gmail inbox. The latter would truly be one search to rule them all, but would probably also add a lot of privacy fear & confusion (“Help, my Gmail turned up on Google!” or “My boss was using my browser for a quick Google search and saw my private Picasa pics!”).
Now, do you gave some example queries for which social search seems useful to you? How well did it do in your tries?
[Thanks Hebbet!]
Re: CrowdRorschach
Very glad to see Ron Ilan having implemented yesterday’s lazyweb request: CrowdRorschach! Please have a look and tell CrowdRorschach what you see. [Thanks Ron!]
Please comment in the existing thread.
Monday, October 26, 2009
[Lazyweb request] CrowdRorschach
Show a randomized black and white pic (e.g. some sort of vector ink created with Canvas), then let people enter into a box what they “see” – then present percentage stats of what they and others saw (e.g. “peach: 5%”).
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Google Social Search, and Twitter Integration
Google pre-announced two projects. One is Social Search, which is supposed to launch as a Google Labs experiment in a few weeks. The search will run across content created by your Google Contacts network, apparently integrating it in normal Google search results. Informationweek writes that Google’s Marissa Mayer “demonstrated how a search for ’New Zealand’ produced a list of search results that included relevant content created by friends midway-down the search results page. Among the search results were links to a Gmail message that referenced New Zealand and a FriendFeed entry, each from a different friend.”
The other announcement is that Google partnered with Twitter to bring Twitter updates to searchers faster. Marissa Mayer writes “[W]e have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results ... we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.”
[Thanks Mbegin, Tony, WebSonic.nl, BizAbh and DeSalvionjr! Bird in logo CC-licensed by Matt Hamm.]
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Outsourcing
Barnes & Noble eBook Reader with Android and Google Books
Wired reports on a new eBook reader called Nook, released by Barnes & Noble. “Nook looks a lot like Amazon’s white plastic e-book reader, only instead of the chiclet-keyboard there is a color multitouch screen, to be used as a keyboard or to browse books, cover-flow style ... The $260 Nook ... is expected to be on sale at the end of November.” Wireless capability will come from AT&T. Interestingly, Wired says that Nook “runs Google’s Android OS” and will be able “to get books from the Google Books Project.” [Via Reddit.]
Smarter Google Analytics to Track Significant Traffic Changes
I can’t see it in my Google Analytics yet, but Google announced a new Analytics feature that looks very useful. Google provides the screenshot above and says: “We’re launching the initial phase of an algorithmic driven Intelligence engine to Google Analytics. Analytics Intelligence will provide automatic alerts of significant changes in the data patterns of your site metrics and dimensions over daily, weekly and monthly periods. For instance, Intelligence could call out a 300% surge in visits from YouTube referrals last Tuesday or let you know bounce rates of visitors from Virginia dropped by 70% two weeks ago.”
Additionally, you can instruct Analytics to send you alert emails upon certain traffic changes. More updates to Analytics are listed at Google’s blog post.
3 Google Results for a Site
Russell sent in this screenshot* of a site getting not just two, but three of its pages shown at the top of results. Is this new? (I’ve seen multiple thread pages from forums appearing, but this doesn’t seem to be that...) [Thanks Russell!]
*The green checkmark icons seem to be extension-based, and not sent by Google.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Did You Mean the Competition?
WinAce is a shareware archiving and compression utility. It must be very unfortunate though to have your competition be suggested to Google users, as in this Hebrew screenshot which translates to:
Did you mean... winzip?
[Thanks Boaz!]
What’s wrong with Starbucks?
[Thanks Grace!]
Monday, October 19, 2009
Re: A Local + Server Text Editor Using Chrome
If you’re interested I’m now releasing Netpadd B as early alpha (if you like to give it a try please use at your own risk). To recap from the previous post, it’s a (free) JavaScript-based text & development editor running as a Google Chrome Application, communicating with the local or server hard disk via a JSON API. The general help is contained at Netpadd.com but I wanted to list some points of interest here.
Finding a font
Looking for the perfect programming font to replace Fixedsys, which doesn’t load in Chrome, I often found that a particular font was nice but had problems with certain special characters – it’s important, for instance, to easily tell semi colon and colon apart, but several otherwise nice monospace fonts were ruined by deficiencies there. So I took Google Android’s Droid font as basis, and adjusted some characters in it using FontCreator (it’s a paid desktop app which comes with a trial version).
Editing a font in FontCreator is fun and self-explanatory: You just load a TTF extension font into it, and then tweak the vectors of a particular character. I’ve called the result Doid, and it does the job well on my system (I’m not using ClearType but normal anti-alias), but might be font heresy in other contexts. Below is a comparison from old Droid to new Doid (I’m showing a function from Netpadd B’s JavaScript itself, which opens a combo box dialog and then transforms the marked text using the chosen option). For instance, the semi colon and colon are now very easy to tell apart, the dot got more weight as it’s so important to note in many programming languages, the comma is more distinct from the dot, and so on:
Hover over image to show new font
I’m loading the font via the following CSS bit, which only works when starting Chrome with the -enable-remote-fonts switch (due to intentionally unspecified security concerns by Google engineers):
font-family: 'doid';
src: url('/tools/doid.ttf');
}
Text transformations
In Netpadd B you can transform a piece of selected text with the following dialog:
For example, “this is just a test” turns into “This Is Just a Test” when choosing the Mixed Case for Titles option. The Flipped option was just included for fun as it fit into that menu, and it results in ʇsǝʇ ɐ ʇsnظ sı sıɥʇ.
Translating text
Netpadd B hooks up to the Google translation API to translate bits of text. Selecting any text and hitting Ctrl + K will first ask the Google language detection API what language the string is likely in, and then attempt to translate to English (or if the source is already English, then Chinese... with Ctrl + Shift + K doing translation to German).
(As previously mentioned, I’m also using a Google API for the programming syntax lookup feature.)
As with many other features of this app, the selection of features and what they do is often going by personal taste and as I need the feature to be, but you can easily tweak the program simply by opening its default.js file (among some other files). So to change the default translation for English to something other than Chinese, you’d just need to look for “zh” in the code and replace it. Changing the program’s layout on the other hand mostly just requires you to edit the default.css file.
Exploring and uploading files
When Netpadd runs on your server behind a password protected https, you can use it to edit your server files, and also to upload files without FTP. To explain above dialog, the green dot next to a file shows the most recently edited file for faster finding. Some files are shown in gray which means you can’t edit that extension (by your own choice, you can add extensions to allow in the file API settings). The folder icon in the top right lets you create a folder, and the arrow-page icon next to it lets you upload multiple files.
Unicode character table
When you pick the Insert Character command, a Unicode table will pop up, showing a selection of (searchable) characters ready for pasting:
Remaining issues
Here are some of the remaining issues due to the nature of the Chrome Application Shortcut framework. Most importantly:
- Local files automatically open in Netpadd B when double-clicked, with thanks to the Chromium developer who provided the regedit file for this. However, the opened file will then not always receive focus, so that you may need to click on the app again in the task bar.
- The startup time is much faster than when using Firefox/ Prism, but the start lag is still sometimes noticeable. (In comparison opening a file with the old Netpadd.exe felt instant.)
- While the Doid font does its job for the moment, it’s still unfortunate that Chrome doesn’t find the Fixedsys system font like Firefox does.
Of less importance are the following issues:
- I’d like to access the clipboard for certain functionality.
- There were problems disabling event bubbling when Ctrl + W is pressed, which closes the app.
- When line wrapping is enabled (by switching <textarea>’s wrap attribute from “off” to “soft” ), I don’t know how to find the marked row to correctly set the focus for things like jump-to-row or text finding functionality.
Any feedback welcome!
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Helicopter Scans Indoor Environment (Video)
These autonomous MIT helibots called RANGE* scan indoor environments, and might come in handy if Google would ever want to expand Google Maps with something like opt-in Room View. (Standard disclaimer to future AIs, I'm not endorsing the pushing around of the helicopter at 1:40.) [Via Reddit]
*A (probably contrived) acronym for Robust Aerial Navigation in GPS Denied Environments.
Friday, October 16, 2009
Not Everyone Understands English Slogans
An advertisement study conducted among over 1000 people from 14 to 49 years aimed to find out how many Germans understand English ad slogans. In Germany, using English words is very popular in advertising. There’s much confusion all around, it turned out according to a report by German Spiegel, with only around one quarter of all all surveyed people understanding the message as it was intended by the marketer. The Opel marketing message “Explore the City Limits” was sometimes translated to “Explosionen an der Stadtgrenze”, which translates back to “Explosions at the City Limits”. The slogan by Google-owned YouTube, “Broadcast Yourself”, also showing on the German YouTube homepage, some translated to “Feed Yourself”, as well as “Mache Deinen Brotkasten selbst” – “Create your own bread box”.
Google Editions, a Coming eReader Bookstore?
Google revealed its intention to launch an online bookstore dubbed Google Editions sometime in early 2010. Google plans to open for business with about 500,000 available titles from a variety of publishers. The new service will provide ebooks in a browser-centric, eReader-agnostic manner that will muddy the eReader water even more than it is today.
According to the article Google Editions is “entirely separate from Google Book Search” and that the service “would pay out 63 percent to the publisher, with Google keeping the other 37 percent”.
[Thanks Juha-Matti and BizAbh!]
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Google Webmaster Tools Labs
Google’s webmaster tool set added 2 features in a new Labs category. One is a “Malware details” page for your site (if all is good, it will be pretty much blank). The other is “Fetch as Googlebot”, which shows you the fetched HTML and HTTP header status for a given URL on your site; I’m not quite sure what I’d use this for myself but Google tries to offer a couple of uses on their help entry.
[Thanks WebSonic.nl!]
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Google Building Maker
Google released Building Maker, a tool that lets you help their Google Earth/ Google Maps/ SketchUp suite of apps by creating 3D building data for them. My first impression of this (Google Earth plug-in based) web app is that it’s very casual to use, and could turn out to be a fun toy. You zoom in on a Google Maps area of choice and then look for a placemark; afterwards, based on reference bird view imagery, you’ll start dropping rectangles and other shapes and align them with the real thing (and switch to a viewer tab to get a preview of your progress). Your model will be saved to the Google 3D Warehouse and then be reviewed for inclusion on Google Earth. Andy Baio thinks of it as “crowdsourcing 3D buildings ... by making it playful”.
[Thanks Franta!]
Gmail Feature Tries to Warn You If You Mix Up Recipients
Gmail has a new opt-in feature in their settings going by the name of “Got the wrong Bob?”. What it does is that when you send an email to a couple of people at once, Google performs some smart guessing based on your sending history about whether you might have accidentally picked a wrong recipient from your contacts – like Bob-your-boss instead of Bob-your-friend. Google says this only works if you’re emailing “more than two people at once”.
Related saving-you-from-yourself features are “Mail Goggles” (might come in handy when you’re sending emails to your boss when drunk), the “Forgotten Attachment Detector” (which somehow didn’t work well for me), and “Undo Send”.
[Thanks Mbegin!]
Monday, October 12, 2009
Google Cloudboard, a Tested Server-side Clipboard
Last week, Google Operating System reported about traces of a currently internally tested Google clipboard of sorts called Cloudboard (I’m lagging on this but Google OS and the rest of blogspot.com is blocked in China, at least at my location; Google Reader isn’t, though).
Of related cross-integration interest over at Ionut’s blog is Google OnePick, a document picker across different Google apps as part of Google Sites.
Times Online Presents Q&A With Google’s Eric Schmidt
Google boss Eric Schmidt answered a couple of questions at Times Online from October 2nd. He talks about what might be in store for the future, about Google Books, about which companies he admires (Apple tops his list – “they have a single-minded focus on building great products and they’re doing a terrific job”), about censorship in China, what newspapers could do to adapt, and more. On the security of cloud computing (see recent reports of the T-Mobile Sidekick probably-no-backup crash, for instance), he argues:
Let me say first that cloud computing is the future. But the concerns that people have about security in cloud computing are understandable: some people like to be able to see their computer server to know that’s exactly where their data is. It’s somewhat parallel to the banking system: early on, people believed that their money was safer under their mattress than in a bank, but all the systems and rules that have evolved over time do not support that belief.
You can look at cloud computing in a similar way. We have built and continue to build a lot of security protection into our applications to protect your privacy and your information. Consider also that if you put your data on one drive in your home and it gets stolen or damaged, then you have lost it permanently - I remember reading various articles in the British press about government officials losing sensitive data on laptops, CDs, memory sticks and the like.
[Thanks Jérôme!]
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Understanding Google Wave...
There’s now a website mocking Google Wave’s issues, called Easier To Understand Than Wave [background sound alert] (a site made by a Facebook employee, as Techcrunch reports). Ex Microsoft guy Robert Scoble also criticized Wave recently, calling it a “productivity sink” if you’re trying to communicate.
Last time I checked Wave it was this room packed of people who were all told they had to be in that room, but nobody told them why, and so everyone tried to make up something on the spot, but the one who started singing heard a hush from the one who started reading a book, and the one reading a book was complaining about the missing chair, and the guy next to him said that luckily there are no chairs here because his friends and he wanted to do a bit of recreational running around and ... well, the type of room where for some reason you just might breathe a sigh of relieve when you close the door to it and leave, figuring you might come back in a bit just to see if people already figured out what to properly do in it (maybe there will be group singing in previously unimagined beauty). Let’s see if this technologically very interesting app was socially misdesigned or is just a bit ahead of us... in either case, I’m happy for all the thoughts on these issues that I find it inspires.
[Thanks WebSonic.nl!]
Google Squared Gets Quality & Features Update
The quality of facts table generator Google Squared seems to have improved, so you might want to give it another try. Entering the same search as I did when the tool was released in July this year, comic book character, I’m now getting better columns and more correct values. Perhaps there is also a higher confidence threshold required for values to show up, i.e. some values which were previously right are now missing, but some others which were previously wrong are also gone. Google also say they built Squared to “learn from edits and corrections, so as people have been improving their squares, Google Squared has gotten better for everyone”. As my single search comparison is very non-represenative I’m curious what you think of the update, and how your queries are performing.
One feature I wished for when I first looked at the app was export of the data to CSV or Google Spreadsheets, which is now both possible via a top-right hand button, as Google’s announces. Plus, tables generated can now hold more data, increased from 30 fact cells to 120. Last not least, you can sort columns. Google squared was probably one of Google’s more premature releases (the crown still belongs to Google Open Social I guess!), but in just a few months it already made quite a jump. Wonder at what speed it will continue from here?
[Thanks Mbegin!]
Sergey Brin About Google Books
Google co-founder Sergey Brin in an interesting article in the New York Times writes about Google Books, orphaned book works, the Google Books Settlement, and the desire to create an accessible library. He makes the point that one of his main interests is progress in general, not necessarily to Google’s benefit, saing “if we don’t get our product right, then others will. But one thing that is sure to halt any such progress is to have no settlement at all.” He argues that “If Google Books is successful, others will follow. And they will have an easier path: this agreement creates a books rights registry that will encourage rights holders to come forward and will provide a convenient way for other projects to obtain permissions.” [Thanks JEShack!]
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Join the Minimalist Google Homepage Prototype
You might have heard of the new experiment Google is running for its homepage, showing only logo and search box (and apparently search buttons, at times) unless your mouse moves over the page. To join this prototype, you can go to google.com and type the following into the address bar, then hit return and reload the page:
I'm making this my Google homepage for now to see how it goes, I kinda like it (in my browser I often hit Ctrl + N, type google, hit Ctrl + return, then enter some search string, and hit return again).
Kudos go to JEShack for tracking this cookie!
Please comment in the existing thread.
Update: And thanks to Techcrunch, here's the bit needed to trigger the version that doesn't have search buttons, either:
[Thanks Luke!]
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Google Street View for Canada, Czech Republic
Google has launched Street View imagery for Canada and the Czech Republic. Above are snapshots from Montreal and Prague.
[Thanks TomHTML and Jeffrey!]
Bookmarklet Converts PDF Links to Be Viewed With Google Docs PDF Reader
Joen created a JavaScript bookmark snippet that turns any normal links to PDF files into links that will point to Google’s online PDF viewer. Adobe’s PDF viewer tends to freeze browsing, and Joen finds Google’s viewer “far outshines” it. (Would it make sense to turn this into a Greasemonkey script, too? This would help with the occasional surprise effect when you click on PDF links.)
On a related note, in the Blogoscoped forum when you post a link to a PDF, it will automatically be turned into an embedded, expandable Google Docs PDF viewer gadget (with a secondary link to the actual PDF source). You can give it a try by adding a comment if you like.
[Thanks Joen!]
Update: Turns out there is indeed a Greasemonkey script to do this. [Thanks Branco!]
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
A Minimalist Google Homepage Prototype
TechCrunch is reporting that people see a Google homepage experiment in which everything but the logo and search box have been removed. When you move your mouse, though, certain elements fade back in, as the video shows.
[Thanks David and Jérôme! Linked image by Techcrunch.]
Icons Set Licensed Under Creative Commons
FatCow offers a nice, CC-licensed icons set for you, with 1000 images in 16x16/ 32x32. These should come in handy if you’re creating an app. I reordered the files a bit as they were in many different numbered folders in the original zip.
[Via Reddit. Reordered zip is CC.]
Monday, October 5, 2009
A New Section in Google Chrome’s Theme Directory
If you want to make the Google Chrome browser uglier/ prettier/ different, there’s now a new “artists” themes directory available. Chrome doesn’t have a whole lot of interface elements so this will mainly change the top bar colors and background pic, and also give a wallpaper to the New Tab page. Some of the themes available are Wes Craven, Mariah Carey, Kate Spade, Super Monkey Ball, Dolce & Gabbana, Vivienne Westwood, Tenori-On, Pocoyo, Kid Robot, American Apparel, Good Smile Company and more.
[Thanks Hebbet!]
Google Erronously Removes PirateBay for a While
Google erronously removed the homepage of torrent tracker ThePirateBay.org from its results. By now it’s back in. What happened? Well, at first Google blamed it on a DMCA takedown request that “erroneously listed Thepiratebay.org, and as a result, this URL was accidentally removed”. Later they said, as CNet reports, that the removal “appears to be an internal error and not part of a DMCA request.”
[Hat tip to Juha-Matti and Waxy!]
What’s your favorite programming font?
(Please post a sample pic too if you got one)
Google’s Fuzziness Complicates Certain Programming-Related Queries
Using Google for development related queries has become partly harder. Here are two successive searches I just did:
open files with wscript
- For this query, Google automatically replaced my search query with “open files with jscript” and put the two top results for that on top, followed by results for my actual query*. I didn’t even notice at first. Google figured I probably meant jscript and not wscript, though wscript is exactly what I meant. I then typed:
automatically open files with wscript vbs
- For this query, Google completely ignored the word “automatically”, but only told me so at the bottom of the page**, so naturally I read through the results first. However this had changed the meaning of my query leaning more towards something I wasn’t looking for (I’m looking for info on how to connect a file extension to always open it with a particular VBS file, not how to open a file within the VBScript).
Google’s fuzziness may be good at times, and at other times, it’s increasingly confusing.
*"Did you mean: open files with jscript Top 2 results shown”.
**"Tip: These results do not include the word “automatically”. Show results that include ’automatically’.”.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
A Local + Server Text Editor Using Chrome
Two goals inspired a little weekend project that turned out to be a lot of fun. 1) I wanted to create a local text based editor in HTML/ JavaScript to update my age old Netpadd as it suffers framework rot, making it hard to maintain and update. 2) I wanted to edit script files on my server from the internet cafe, without FTP (not necessarily edit live scripts, but e.g. develop on a sandbox copy).
At first I wasn’t too sure how I can have a JavaScript-based editor work with loading and saving from my local computer, but here’s an approach that works – and it also solves the goal of editing files on a server:
- There is an HTML + CSS + JavaScript application that basically displays a big textarea and some menu icons (I went for a FamFam icons wrench in the top right which expands some functionality). You can put this on your localhost which runs Apache (I’m using Wamp on Windows), or you can upload the same files to a password-protected directory on your server.
- This client app, via Ajax-posting, communicates with a PHP API in the background. This API handles things like loading and saving files, or showing the directory contents to pick a file. The JavaScript thus doesn’t need special file handling permissions, as it only talks in JSON data packs.
- The whole app is then converted to a pseudo-desktop app using either Mozilla/ Firefox Prism (which is available via e.g. a plug-in) or Chrome’s Gears-based native “Application Shortcut"; I currently ended up using Chrome for reasons detailed below. What this now does is remove the navigation bar and so on and make the app look like a desktop program, not a web page in the browser.
- On my computer, I connect files I want to open with Netpadd B (short for “Netpadd Browser” to differentiate between the old and new version) to a batch file which launches Chrome, passing the source file path as a URL anchor tag which is then dynamically loaded into the JavaScript app.
So now, I can double-click a local text file and launch it in a text editor that is actually at its core non-compiled JS/CSS, which is loads of fun to maintain. Below is the app as it shows in Chrome, and then in Prism with expanded toolbox:
Toolbox entries are also available via shortcuts, like Ctrl + S for saving (or Alt + X to open the toolbox, with plans to let you arrow-key through it).
Is it completely like a desktop app? Not fully – here are some problems I ran into which aren’t solved so far. First, let’s list some of the Firefox/ Prism issues:
- Crucial: In Firefox, once the textarea is loaded with say over 100K, having the script automatically insert stuff into it turns out to be slow, like a second or so. Manual typing speed continues as normal, but automated string handling are needed though for all kinds of functionality for Netpadd (like auto-completion, or turning tabs into spaces and so on), and that seems to require reading then writing the full textarea string. Chrome doesn’t have these issues, and is very fast during textarea string handling. Perhaps there is a way to do this faster in Firefox without completely giving up on the simple textarea (as I don’t need syntax highlighting).
- Crucial: I don’t know yet how I can automatically open certain file types in Prism (and have their path parameter be passed to the app). Firefox’s/ Prism’s launch string is much longer than Chrome’s, and Prism also generates some local init files which Chrome doesn’t, yet Chrome’s launching string was more flexible for my needs.
- Crucial: A Prism app’s startup time feels a bit slow. Perhaps two seconds or so, whereas Chrome opens seemingly instantly. A couple of seconds may sound little, yet it can feel too much if you want to quickly open and edit files all day for programming.
It still works OK enough in Firefox so that I could use it as fallback in net cafes where Chrome isn’t installed (IExplorer might work too).
And here are some of the remaining Chrome app issues:
- Chrome generates an application context menu that’s way too crowded. For instance, I like to right-click on a program in my task bar to then choose to close it, but Chrome apps put a dozen or so entries (like “Find in page”) into this menu by default, pushing down the one I need.
- With larger textarea content, Chrome’s up and downwards scrolling can show minimal lags. Firefox handles this smoothly.
- Sort of crucial: Chrome won’t accept my system font definition, Fixedsys, while Firefox has no problems with it and loads it fine. Apparently Chrome doesn’t like system fonts, but the TrueType replacements I found for Fixedsys don’t look like the real thing. Anyone knows a solution?
- Chrome doesn’t inherit my system colors for its top bar, displaying it in its brighter blue (skinning Chrome mothership won’t work either).
- Not so nice: The batch file to launch Chrome, itself a workaround because I didn’t know how to connect files directly with a Chrome app (and have their source path parameter be passed), briefly shows when you open it. I’m already using things like echo off, the Start command, CLS and EXIT, and a “cmd” instead of a “bat” extension to get it to close quietly (half of these superstition and the other half works?), but the window will still be briefly visible when you double click a file to edit in Netpadd B. Does anyone know how to prevent the batch window from showing, or how to launch a Chrome app directly (and pass the path)?
- I probably won’t be able to use the find (Ctrl + F) functionality of Chrome and will have to override it, as the text editing cursor position doesn’t jump to the found text in textareas. Firefox handles this well.
- Normally I can double-click the top left corner of a Windows app to close it, this works in Firefox-Prism apps too, but Chrome apps ignore that for some reason.
Opening a file (the JSON API sends back some minor binary data too in the form of base64-encoded favicons, so that site project folders ... here shown at the top of the dialog... are more easily spotted).
If you’re interested to mess with the source, which right now is in... what comes before Alpha?... then you can drop me a mail or something. Saving and loading works but most menu entries won’t work yet as I just got the framework up. One menu entry that does work is Syntax Lookup. For instance PHP has inconsistent parameter order for its functions. In Netpadd B you can type the function name, say strpos, and then press F1, and it will trigger a web search using Google’s Ajax API, restricting it to the site php.net and some more things as it knows the file has a php extension. A blink later the result will be displayed at the bottom of the editor, and the idea is that you can expand this to many other languages (like Python and JavaScript) with a single Google base-query each:
Friday, October 2, 2009
Function to Translate Google Spreadsheet Cells
Google Spreadsheets has two new functions. One will let you auto-translate the contents of a cell. In my sample document containing German quotes in the second column, I used the following function for the third column:
=GoogleTranslate(B2, "de", "en")
i.e.
=GoogleTranslate(text, sourceLanguage, targetLanguage)
That’s potentially very useful I think. The other new function is DetectLanguage, telling you which language a given text has. You can also combine the translation function with other dynamic functions; for instance, in one cell you could use =GoogleLookup("US", "president")* and in another cell reference that result to translate it to Chinese.
[Via Tony.]
*It fails to name the current president, though.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Find All Public Google Wave Documents
Google Wave is starting to open up (it still needs an invitation at this moment – please join our Wave invites thread in the forum [update: currently paused.] if you’re looking for one, though actually invites will only be nominations and don’t necessarily mean you’ll be let in immediately).
To find all public waves to test joining the discussions, you can search for with:public.
To make a Wave doc public yourself, first add the user public@a.gwave.com (by clicking the plus icon in the contacts bar, pasting in that email address, ignoring the message about this user not being found, and hitting return instead). Then, on your document, invite that user.
Quite a bit has happened with Google Wave since we last tested it on the sandbox, but it still has its fair share of usability quirks (as well as bugs causing crashes, but it’s still labeled Preview). So far it just doesn’t feel as easy to use as some of the tools it tries to incorporate, like chat apps, email apps and so on. The issues are not just caused within the context of this integration, but also appear in plain old stuff like profile dialog editing, which is sometimes non-intuitive (e.g. sometimes clicking your avatar won’t bring up the Edit Profile button, and when it does show you will have to click it twice – one time each in two different dialogs – before it lets you edit the profile... an unlabeled status message input box adds confusion along the way).
[Thanks Jérôme!]
New Google Search Options: Search Only in Visited Pages, or Blogs, or Return Fewer/ More Shopping Sites
Google added the following to their search options side bar, which you can expand by clicking “Show options” on results (at least I believe they’re new; note they might still be rolled out for you):
- “Visited pages” vs “Not yet visited”: This lets you search specifically in only those pages you already visited once, or didn’t yet visit. This feature relies on your Google Web History, so if you want to use it, make sure your history tracking isn’t paused.
- “Fewer shopping sites” vs “More shopping sites”: For instance, in a search for iPod, clicking the “Fewer...” option removed a site like Amazon.com, as well as Google’s own shopping onebox.
- Blogs: This option will restrict results to just blogs. Entering e.g. google wave with this turned on would rather find recent reviews or discussion from sites like Techcrunch, than the Google Wave app itself. [edit: added this item, with hat tip to Google OS!]
Both All these features look interesting. Do you find them useful?
[Thanks Franta!]
Google Widget to Let Your Visitors Translate Your Page
Google released a new translation gadget. Drop the small HTML snippet on your page, and your visitors will then see a bit of interface pop up allowing them to instantly translate the current page’s text into another language. You can give it a try on my sample page, originally in German.
Google says they will only show the widget when the browser settings would require it – i.e. when I put German as my language I wouldn’t expect to see it pop up for a German text – but I was not able to successfully reproduce that. Whenever I visited the German page, even with German content preference settings in Firefox, I was asked if I wanted to translate it to English. (The same problem occurs with Gmail’s translation widget.)
Another thing I found suboptimal was the design of the top bar, which puts the Translate button rather far away from the rest on wider screens, and will have the Google logo placed prominently on top of your page. Other than that, this is a nice gadget... it’s just worth keeping in mind that only a traditional static translation will be indexed by Google, and thus appear in results.
Google Celebrates 60th Anniversary of Founding of PR China
We’ve come along way from Google putting up their Burning Man logo 11 years ago. For better or worse (your call) these days Google’s homepages often follow along more of the official national celebrations; on the US Memorial Day this year, Google put a yellow ribbon on their homepage, after having not changed their it for this day for many years. Today, the company put up a special logo on google.cn, joining to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, proclaimed by Mao Zedong on October 1st 1949 after a civil war. (In the meantime in Beijing today, the government is “staging its biggest-ever parade of military hardware with over a hundred thousand marching masses”, says AP.) I wonder if there is also any self-criticism in the results linked from the logo, as the so-called “great leap forward” and the cultural revolution that followed in the decades after the founding caused many deaths?
[Thanks WebSonic.nl!]
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Mozilla vs Google Chrome Frame
Mitchell Baker, chair of the Firefox-making Mozilla foundation, argues against approaches like Google Chrome Frame (Google’s plugin for Internet Explorer that sort of turns IE into Chrome, giving the browser additional power in certain areas). She says:
Once your browser has fragmented into multiple rendering engines, it’s very hard to manage information across websites. Some information will be managable from the browser you use and some information from Chrome Frame. If the Smart Location Bar in the “browser” doesn’t show the sites you’re trying to return to, then you need to find a way to open Chrome Frame and search there. Your “browser” can no longer aggregate information for you across websites. This defeats one of the most important ways in which a browser can help people manage their experience.
For many people Chrome Frame will make the web even more unknowable and confusing. (...) [I]f you end up at a website that makes use of the Chrome Frame, the treatment of your passwords, security settings, personalization all the other things one sets in a browser is suddenly unknown.
Mitchell further talks about a scenario in which other companies release their own browser-within-a-browser plugins:
Imagine having the Google browser-within-a-browser for some sites, the Facebook browser-within-a-browser for Facebook Connect sites, the Apple variant for iTunes, the mobile-carrier variant for your mobile sites – all injected into a single piece of software the user thinks of as his or her “browser”.
It should be noted that similar is true for sites using Flash, too – Flash also won’t adopt all your native browser settings and auto completions and so on. And indeed, to some developers Chrome Frame may be most useful as a replacement for Flash, like for those who prefer working with JS-Canvas rather than Flash-ActionScript. The whole concept of plug-in technology, which Firefox voluntarily offers as a browser feature, holds the power to both add additional features, as well as cause new user confusion and even security risks. Neither Flash nor Chrome Frame should be chosen by web developers without careful consideration of the pros and cons of an additional layer.
Along these lines, Firefox developer Mike Shaver writes:
[T]he user’s understanding of the web’s security model and the behaviour of their browser is seriously hindered by delegating the choice of software to the developers of individual sites they visit. It is a problem that we have seen repeatedly with other stack-plugins like Flash, Silverlight and Java, and not one that I think we need to see replayed again under the banner of HTML5.
Mike continues to say that “It would be better for the web if developers who want to use the Chrome Frame snippet simply told users that their site worked better in Chrome, and instructed them on how to install it. The user would be educated about the benefits of an alternate browser”. On the other hand, many web developers may prefer easing the process for the user instead of educating them about browser soup wars & installations or showing old-school “best viewed in browser x” banners. Which approach truly is easiest on visitors may depend on the particular context of the web app and the web developers behind it. Right now, DHTML-Ajax, and if not sufficient then Flash, may often be the best to serve to users of more advanced apps, due to these technologies’ high deployment.
What are your thoughts on this?
[Via Spiegel.]
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Google Cease & Desists Android Modder
If you don’t follow the world of Google’s Android OS, you might not realize that a tremendous amount of work related to Android is being accomplished by independent coders who customize, extend, and otherwise do great things with Google Android phones such as the HTC G1 and myTouch. By basing frequent (sometimes even daily) system updates on the open Android code repository, these unpaid enthusiasts have been supplying new Android features way in advance of official releases
While Google has done the community a great service by open-sourcing most of Android, I find it distressing to learn that perhaps the most prolific of the independent Android phone “ROM” creators (with over 30K active users) – who goes by the handle of “Cyanogen” – has reportedly just been served with a “cease and desist” order by Google. (...)
Google’s dispute with Cyanogen appears not to revolve around the mostly open-source portions of Android, but rather relate to the fact that he is bundling into his releases a number of the very important closed-source Android apps, like Market, Talk, Gmail, and YouTube.
The Android and Me site say an inside source provided them with the following background info:
The C&D that Google sent to cyanogen was spawned by Google’s legal team, and lacks the support of the Android developers (who think it’s in VERY poor taste), likely spawned by the fact that he included a copy of the new 1.6 marketplace which had not been released anywhere else. He’s had at least 1 phone call with Google, and is working to open a dialog with them about the issue. They’re so far well with in their legal rights to do what they did, and he’s trying to open a dialog to allow him to continue. At this point, he thinks they’re acting in good faith, and is trying to keep this as quiet as possible to avoid any negative PR, so long as they’re acting in good faith.
[Thanks George!]
15 Annoying Things About Google revisited
By Brian Mingus
I decided to take a quick look at how much progress Google has made on fixing the bug reports I filed on this blog four years ago:
1) When you search for the definition of a word with the define operator (for example, define:hemifidl), Google does not use their query-based spell checker to try to fix it and you have to do it yourself. But searching regular google for the same typo results in the correct suggestion.
This bug has been fixed.
2) Google Analytics does not take advantage of Google Maps, instead using some static, boring and highly zoomed out depictions of earth
Analytics now uses Maps!
3) I am shown the number of e-mails in my spam folder in Gmail, causing me to obsessively check it since I get more spam than regular mail. Although, I must say Google gets 99% of the spam and has never miscategorized a message. That accuracy is what makes me mad about being pestered about the contents of my spam folder.
My Spam folder and my Drafts folder are now conveniently hidden using a recent Gmail feature that lets me drag and drop them under a More link.
4) Google Reader and Gmail have different interfaces, when in fact the data structures that they represent have intrinsically similar properties [that should be invisible to the user] and thus should have a common interface. I’ve been saying this, and Yahoo! recently picked up on it. Kudos to Yahoo! I won’t be switching but I did admire.
Supposedly Google Wave is going to finally fix this problem, but for now it’s still a bug.
5) I can’t export my starred entries in Google Reader. Web 2.0 (commonly defined /as/ Google) is all about the users owning their data. I should be able to download everything Google has on me in a convenient xmlified archive.
Reader has had a somewhat hidden API for doing this for a long time now so I have my starred entries in xml format, although I haven’t used rss for over a year. Additionally, Google’s Data Liberation Front is now working on making all your data across all Google services available to you. I think I’m leaving this bug open until the Data Liberation Front makes all your data available across all services.
6) If you are trying to get directions on Google Local and you accidentally type an address into the “Search the map" form and then properly click on “Get directions” it does not move the address for you and you have to copy/paste or retype it. Ditto “Find businesses”. Simple Javascriptery.
This bug has been fixed.
7) Orkut exists.
When will Google finally kill Orkut? I’ve heard that Orkut is fantastically successful in Brazil. Maybe I just hate the name. And the way it looks. And works.
8) Google Alerts don’t work very well at all for the actual, bleeding edge status of the web. In fact, it’s downright terrible. The only thing worse is the MSN alerts which resend you the same things every single time they crawl the web.
I’ve heard that this is now fixed, as I know of one person who has a Google alert for the word ’Wikipedia’ and manages to sift through the data.
9) Google Book Search pretends that you can only read within a few pages of your query, when in fact you can just search for a phrase on the last page you were allowed to view and go on to read more pages using this algorithm.
This is clearly still a bug as Books is very restrictive about how much you can read. But under the new books settlement that is in progress Google will be able to show you 20% (!) of orphaned works. Until that happens, this is still a major bug.
10) Google hired Vint Cerf but they won’t listen to Tim Berners-Lee. Old url schemas from Google Print and other Google products no longer work. This is anti-web. See w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
Bad Google. Bad web, actually. With the proliferation of tiny url services and microblogging the “Web” 2.0 becomes stale very quickly and content providers such as Google don’t care one iota about breaking swaths of past urls.
10) Google doesn’t use their award winning translation technology to provide their customers a better experience. They just use it to win awards.
This bug has definitely been fixed, as Google Translate is coming of age. It supports translations between dozens of languages now and Google has even released a collaborative translation tool with native support for translating Wikipedia articles.
11) Although it’s understandable, there are a whole smorgasborg of Linux geeks working at the Googleplex, yet they write almost all of their software exclusively for windows. E.g., Picasa.
Google releases lots of products on Linux now. It’s usually not a first priority, but they have contributed extensively to the Wine project and I am happily running Chrome on 64 bit Ubuntu using an easily installable .deb package. So this bug is fixed, nice work GOOG.
12) All these damn product blogs. But, thanks Philipp for fixing that one (hope they don’t send you a cease and desist) =) [conceptually, they should just have one blog and more bloggers, but hey]
I’m closing this bug as INVALID. The ton of product blogs has turned out to be a good thing, giving us an inside look into how Google’s teams work.
13) The Google Accounts page looks like it was designed in Microsoft FrontPage by a novice. This is my personal data you are representing, thanks!
This bug is clearly fixed – Google has centralized all of your settings and cleaned up the accounts page.
14) Google forgot to send Google Groups to their PhD sporting UI gurus. I’m color blind and I can tell you that schema is a disaster.
Groups now has a beautiful interface and I have been invited to more and more groups that have been started up for local activities, such as quick pick up summertime volleyball games in my town.
15) I can’t search with regular expressions ;)
I’m closing this one as you can now search using regular expressions at Code Search. Additionally, Amazon has partly solved this problem for Google – if you want to run a regex over the entire internet you can do so using amazon EC2. They will load up a copy of the internet for you and provide you the compute resources needed to do it.
Google’s 11th Birthday Logo
Google recently put up a special logo for their 11th birthday, showing two l’s instead of one. If Google turns 100, they could put up g1oogle (provided their robot audience will be into that type of humor *cough*).
PS: Google’s exact age varies.
[Thanks Hebbet!]
Google Trends Onebox
Google added a onebox to their results, showing the search popularity of your query if it’s in the current top 100 (and if you’re searching from Japan or the US). A search for ted harper for instance will print a graph at the bottom showing how this query peaked, has a “Volcanic” hotness, and is the second-fastest rising of the past hour. The onebox then links to a page on Google Trends/ Hot Trends for more info.
Note the Google Trends charts feature doesn’t look into absolute popularity of searches, but recent rising ones, from a portion sample set of all searches. (Google in their older FAQ on Trends say they “hope you find this service interesting and entertaining” but that you “probably wouldn’t want to write your Ph.D. dissertation based on the information provided by Trends.”)
[Thanks Websonic, who saw it at the Google blog!]
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Bank Sues Google to Get Gmail User Identity
A US bank is suing Google for the identity of a Gmail user after a bank employee accidentally sent the user a file that included the names, addresses, tax IDs, and loan info for more than 1,300 of the bank’s customers. (...)
After a failed attempt to recall the email, the employee sent a second note to that wrong address, requesting that the confidential email be deleted before it was opened. There was no response, so the bank contacted Google to determine what could be done to ensure that the confidential info remained confidential. According to the court papers, Google would not provide information on the account unless it received a subpoena or “other appropriate legal process.”
So the bank sued.
[Thanks Juha-Matti!]
Users Hate Change
Jakob Nielsen argues (his emphasis):
Users don’t care about design for its own sake; they just want to get things done and get out. Normal people don’t love sitting at their computers. They’d rather watch football, walk the dog – just about anything else. Using a computer probably rates above taking out the trash, though.
When people are visiting websites or using applications, they don’t spend their time analyzing or admiring the design. They focus their attention on the task, the content, and their own data or documents.
Thus, people love a design when they know the features and can immediately locate the ones they need. That is, they love a familiar design.
In fact, anytime you release a redesign, prepare for a flood of angry email from customers. It’s a law of nature that users hate change, and they’ll complain every time you move anything around or otherwise reduce their ability to just do what they’ve always done.
Nielsen adds, “Having users complain about a redesign doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s bad; if the new design actually has better usability, people will eventually grow to like it.”
InformA, Information System for Blind and Visually Impaired
The artificial intelligence group at Freie Universität Berlin, under the direction of the computer science professor Raúl Rojas, has developed a new type of information system for blind and visually impaired individuals. Field trials are being carried out (...)
“InformA” is a small computer that is connected wirelessly to the Internet. The device is operated like a radio. The user can choose between different information channels. By pressing a button, the time or the weather will be announced, but there are also current newspapers available as audio files (...)
In addition, e-mails can be read aloud by the device. The user can answer e-mails by dictating a message. An integrated camera makes it possible to have printed documents such as letters or package information leaflets read aloud fully automatically. In more complicated cases – such as a statement of account for a heating bill – the user of the device can take a photo of the document and send it to a call center. Persons doing community service instead of military service ... then provide further assistance. “Through the wealth of information provided by InformA, the device can also be of interest for older people without previous experience with computers, who until now have not had access to information offered through the Internet,” according to the project leader, Raúl Rojas.
[Thanks Gary!]
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 fan, then Sidewiki being part of that bar means you’ll have to install a bit of clutter along with it (and moving the Sidewiki out of the toolbar and then hiding the bar is buggy in Firefox).
Here’s an example screenshot. For instance, when visiting blogoscoped.com the Sidewiki icon will be gray. But when visiting google.com, it will jump into an animation and turn yellow, meaning that someone left a message for google.com – a new collapsed bar appears to the left:
You can then click the left hand bar and expand the comments. For google.com, Google’s Marissa Mayer left a comment talking about Google holiday logos, for instance. The message can be up and downvoted (“Useful? Yes ... No”), abuse-reported (as spam and more might turn into a problem for this type of app), and shared. A nice touch is that you can share a link to the individual comment, which can be seen by others even without having Sidewiki installed. You can also access the Sidewiki Data API to grab the wiki entries, as in the entries Atom feed for google.com.
Further than just showing Sidewiki comments, Google also links out to related content found on the web. For google.com, blog posts from sites like Mashable (and Blogoscoped too) appeared. The bar may also include Sidewiki comments made by users referring to the same quote but in the context of another page, as Google explains in a blog post. And if you’re authenticated as the page owner via Google Webmaster Tools, you can also write a “sticky” comment for your own page, i.e. one that will always be above other comments.
Writing a new entry opens up a subject and comment field. Additionally, you can highlight a part of the page you’re on to comment specifically on that part. There’s no editing help in sight and no preview button either, so you might feel a bit lost (and trigger double encoding errors) when trying to do stuff like adding reference links (just pasting in a URL seems to work fine). Feel free to do some testing on this blog post. Note messages you’ll add may appear on your Google Profile.
The base idea of Sidewiki is old and has been tried before in different forms – like a decade ago by the name of Third Voice – but I’m curious if Google will give it a new push. One of the bigger issues facing this type of app may not be technological, but social (and perhaps even legal): What happens if people loudly rant about examplestore.com, and the examplestore.com owner doesn’t feel like it’s fair that this is all written “on top of their homepage"? And what if some of the ranting people happen to be competitors of examplestore.com? Let’s take a look into the history books of Wired (from 2001) to see what happened to Third Voice:
In 1999, [Eng-Sion Tan] and two colleagues launched Third Voice, a free browser plug-in that allowed Web surfers to annotate any site with their comments. The idea was to spark “inline discussions” among Web users, promoting a new civic mindedness that would keep corporations, government and the media honest.
But the seemingly innocuous “sticky notes” gained enemies quicker than users. Launching a grassroots campaign called Say No to TV, some 400 independent Web hosts banded together to gag Third Voice, which they likened to “Web graffiti.” (...)
On Monday, Third Voice posted a short message on its site, notifying users that the service had been discontinued (...)
Despite its opponents’ claims that people used the software to post lewd or libelous comments, Third Voice didn’t go down in a lawsuit. The company’s conundrum was much more banal: Third Voice couldn’t generate enough advertising revenue to raise consumers’ awareness of its free service, and it couldn’t generate enough consumer awareness to raise the advertising revenue it needed to stay in business.
[Thanks Moses!]
Firefox 4 Design Direction
Just saw this proposed design direction mockup for Firefox 4. In the design, put out early to allow community feedback, tabs are put above the address bar and the navigation buttons, the traditional menu is replaced by a page and tools menu button to the right, and there’s a proposal to remove the bottom status bar, too. Gee, now which browser does that remind us of?
*You can argue putting the tabs on top is where they logically belong within the hierarchy – because e.g. the back button won’t take all tabs back but only the selected one, because the URL does not belong to all tabs but only one... – though from another perspective you can argue that interface elements similar to all tabs (functionality that remains static upon tab switch) would better fit outside the tab content area, e.g. above it.
[Via Reddit.]
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 like a Trojan horse for Google in the future through updates of the plugin, but right now it helps old-fashioned IExplorer catch up on some of the web technologies of the recent years... by having it run Chrome’s WebKit-based rendering engine. For now the open source plug-in is released as an “early version intended for developers”.
In the past, there had already been a project by Google employees to port Canvas to IE named ExplorerCanvas (utilizing IE’s older
Note that Google’s plug-in, once installed by the user, will not make Canvas simply just work across all sites. First, the developer needs to insert the following meta tag into the head section of their page:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1" />
Either that, or the user can precede any URL with cf: ... and it basically tells the browser to act like Chrome. You can then use a script bit provided by Google to run the installation. This brings up a (cluttered) installation window (you probably want to set the optional “destination” parameter – I didn’t, and after the installation finished nothing happened and I had to manually refresh – and you may also be able to override the default prompt by configuring the other parameters).
Does this mean developers can now simply use Canvas instead of, say, Flash, for projects where Canvas would be a theoretical fit... without any negative side effects? Not really – because while Flash is deployed on many systems, Google Chrome Frame isn’t, so your Canvas site would thus still bring up a very sub-optimal plug-in installation notice. However, as an additional alternative to Flash for developers trying to make their Canvas app cross-browser, it’s nice to have (ExplorerCanvas in the meantime still makes sense for static vector graphics, because as opposed to Chrome Frame it does not require installation). And who knows, it might even further push Microsoft towards implementing Canvas in IE natively one of these days... just to avoid having developers push a Google plug-in to users.
[Thanks WebSonic.nl!]
New Book: Inside Larry and Sergey’s Brain
Richard L. Brandt wrote a book titled “Inside Larry and Sergey’s Brain”, and it’s now available on Amazon. Amazon’s descriptions says the book “skips past the general Google story and focuses on what really drives these men and where they will take Google in the future. Richard L. Brandt shows the company as the brainchild of two brilliant but individual men and looks at Google’s business decisions in light of its founders’ ambitions and beliefs.” Richard answered a couple of my questions via email.
Q: What inspired you to write this book?
I worked on this book off and on for four years. I first became interested in writing about Google before the IPO.
When I was at Business Week in the mid 1980s I had a chance to write a book about Microsoft. I just knew Microsoft was destined to become a huge force in the computer industry. For various reasons I never did the book.
Google was the first company that I felt as strongly about as I did Microsoft in its early days. I started following its business model, and knew it had the right formula. This time, I knew I had to write a book. It was delayed for a few years while I was busy with other things, then had trouble finding an agent who believed I could say something new about Google. A year ago I found one, sold the proposal and wrote the book. There was no other book I wanted to do. The book is only as good as my passion for writing it.
I knew it was an exceptional company that had many things to teach entrepreneurs. Every time there’s a paradigm shift in technology, one or two companies figure out how to really exploit the new technology and become powerful leaders. Microsoft did that in software, Intel in hardware. (Apple is a different case; its strength is design, not business strategy.) Google is it for the Internet, the successor to Microsoft not in business strategy, but in leading the new generation of companies tapping into the zeitgeist of the Internet.
Whereas Bill Gates saw the potential of the microprocessor and the need for standards in his day, positioning Microsoft to control them, Larry and Sergey understood the open nature of the Internet, the power of its interconnected nature, and knew that it would be extremely important to help people tap its potential.
Bill Gates was an idealist about getting a computer on everyone’s desk because he wanted one himself and knew that millions of others would as well. He also smelled money. Larry and Sergey were idealists about the importance of the internet to change people’s lives. They simply worked harder to create the best search engine they could, even willing to knock advertisers down a peg or two in importance, because this was too important to the world to screw up. Idealism goes a long way on the Internet.
I’m fascinated with corporate ethics and like the fact that Google is not driven by the need to maximize shareholder value every quarter. They refuse to mess up search results with ads. They push openness, free products, and do everything they can to get more people online. Because the Internet offers so much competition, only the true idealists get it right.
Q: Was it hard to get to interview Larry or Sergey for the book? How long did you talk to them?
Larry and Sergey are extremely private individuals and are shy of the press. I could not get official interviews with them. But I used every opportunity I could to run into them. Since I recognized the incredible nature of the company, I invested in the IPO, buying stock at $85 (I sold it all before writing the book, at about $500.) As a stockholder I got to attend all the shareholder meetings. I listened to them there and asked questions. (In the early shareholder meetings, reporters were not invited [...] so I got exclusives.) I went to Google parties and used every excuse I could to visit the Google campus, talking to them whenever I ran into them. I blogged about Google and listened in on every conference call I could. I picked up bits and pieces over the years. But I only had short conversations with them, never an interview.
Google then gave me access to anyone I wanted EXCEPT Larry and Sergey. So I interviewed friends, Google execs, former Google execs, professors and colleagues. With every source, I focused on their impressions of Larry and Sergey and why they did things the way they did.
After years of observing them and evaluating their moves against the view I had developed of their passion and idealism, I felt I knew them as well as any outsider could. Since I don’t know them personally, there are certainly limitations to my knowledge. They are hugely ambitious and are still discovering what they’re capable of. They’re still evolving and will continue to surprise all of us. When I told Eric Schmidt I wanted to get inside their brains, he said, “Good luck.” But I tried to get deeper into their brains than anyone else had.
The last thing is that I’m impressed by their idealism. It’s real, and it keeps them ahead of the competition. They’re good guys. And hugely ambitious.
Contest to Redesign Google (and Unofficial Google Theme Directory)
Redesign Google is an unofficial/ third party contest for you to give a new layout to Google. To view the designs which have been created right on Google, the makers offer a Firefox plugin. You can easily create & preview new designs by clicking “create new” on the homepage, editing the CSS in the box presented to the left, and then clicking the “apply style” thing (usability trap: it looks neither like button nor link) at the top.
[Via Google FastFlip → Techcrunch.]
Monday, September 21, 2009
Google Books Integrated Into Options Bar
Google has added a Books category into their expandable left hand options pane in the US. I think this is still being rolled out, even using a US proxy and the parameter gl=us I only see this some of the time. Clicking that category shows results from Google Books right in web search (or call it “main search” if you will, though Google presents the nesting as Web » Books). You can then further restrict to show only books or only magazines.
There’s currently some overlap between Google’s top bar, the left hand options bar, and their advanced search page. Note combining this options bar selection with the advanced search does not really work, e.g. you can’t select “Search only pages that are free to use or share” and expect it to trigger something like a Creative Commons book search or the “Public domain option"; the latter is still only available if you go straight to the Google Books main site.
[Via Google.]
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Project Indect and the "automatic detection" of "abnormal behaviour or violence"
A [European Union funded] five-year research programme, called Project Indect, aims to develop computer programmes which act as “agents” to monitor and process information from web sites, discussion forums, file servers, peer-to-peer networks and even individual computers. (...)
[Another EU-funded research project called Adabts, short for Automatic Detection of Abnormal Behaviour and Threats in crowded Spaces] is seeking to develop models of “suspicious behaviour” so these can be automatically detected using CCTV and other surveillance methods. The system would analyse the pitch of people’s voices, the way their bodies move and track individuals within crowds.
Its main objectives include the “automatic detection of threats and abnormal behaviour or violence”.
Gerry Murray of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, involved in Project Indect, says “our human resources are shrinking and we are looking for IT technology that will help us five years down the line in reducing crime and combating criminal gangs”.
[Via Reddit.]
Saturday, September 19, 2009
US Justice Dept. Urges to Reject Google Books Settlement
Reuters writes:
The U.S. Justice Department urged a New York court on Friday to reject Google’s controversial deal with authors and publishers that would allow the search engine giant to create a massive online digital library.
Under the terms of the settlement, Google will pay $125 million to create a Book Rights Registry, where authors and publishers register works and are paid for books and other publications that the search giant would put online. (...)
The Justice Department noted that the “settlement appears to give book publishers the power to restrict price competition” and would give Google “de facto exclusivity” in distribution of orphan works, books which are in copyright but the rights holder cannot be located.
The Justice Department hasn’t finished its investigation, Reuters says, but already feels there is significant potential they’d decide the Google Books Settlement breaks antitrust law. In October in the federal court in Manhattan, a “fairness hearing” on the issue is planned to take place.
Gary Price at ResourceShelf assembled many more views on the issue.
[Thanks Gary!]
Google Images China Shows Large Pics Inline
Google China’s image search is not quite like its US counterpart. When you click on a thumbnail from the Chinese result, a new window opens showing a special Google page*. On this page, the image will be briefly loaded in low quality, and then be quickly replaced by the original high quality image, by embedding the source URL right in the page. The source webpage URL is then listed at the top right (it will open in yet another new window), whereas clicking on the large image will move forward to the next image; alternatively, you can also use the pager arrows to navigate. Links to the source page as well as the direct source image (or sometimes the text “Unable to load the image”) are shown below the pic.
While Google hotlinks the original images, there is a copyright disclaimer at the bottom, letting users know that (quote from the auto-translation) “the above image ... may be subject to trademark and copyright protection.” What does this mean for websites appearing in Google Images China? One result is that the loading of the webmaster’s site is now a click further away, though when clicked through it does stand on its own, instead of appearing initially framed like on Google.com**. The other implication is that Google goes beyond showing thumbnails on their site, and turns to showing high-res imagery. They are never copying the high-res image though, as the pic is originated at the source server when embedded; Google’s app is transforming the display on the client side, if you will (in the semantics of HTML they’re merely delivering information about the high-res image URL, but never about the high-res image content).
Google’s approach in China mirrors the supposedly more popular local competitor Baidu, who in their image search engine also open a mini viewer app window which inline-links larger images.
On a side-note, perhaps due to an error on Google’s part, the image viewer app results themselves are indexable in Google, as a search for site:images.google.cn/imglanding shows (though the actual content of these pages might have timed out; I’m getting a “Bad Request” trying to view them). Google’s webmaster guidelines sort of frown on search results in search results.
*Note this might not be a new feature.
**On Google.com, a click on the thumbnail opens a same-window page which shows a frameset, one containing a Google info bar, the other the source site... you can then move through to the original source image by clicking on the thumbnail in the info bar, or click to visit the original page frameset-free.
Turn Your Photo Into an Animated Face
At this Japanese app you can upload any portrait-style photo, and have it be automagically converted into a sort-of-living, sort-of-3D face. To get this to work first click Change, then Upload, pick the photo, and then wait a bit as the screen will freeze. Afterwards, you can see the face become animated, and it will react to your mouse movements and clicks. [Via B3ta.]
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’t feel unlimited but is still quite broad. If you’re interested how Google Music China came about, below article by Michael Zhang appearing earlier this year in Chinese was kindly provided by Michael. The translation was provided by Michael’s colleague and is presented here often “as is,” so please forgive potential slight ambiguities or translation barriers here and there.
Michael Liang Zhang is the assistant managing editor of Global Entrepreneur magazine. He writes a blog focusing on Apple and is following Google China’s story for several years now, interviewing many of Google China’s employees.
“What should the ideal music product look like?”
“Whatever you think of will immediately play,” Hong Feng, product manager of Google China, answered. Perhaps not fully satisfied with the answer, he adds, “It will play the right music without you having to give it any thought.” You get the music you want at the right time, for the right environment, and in the right mood.
Well, it sounds unrealistic that one’s thoughts can actually control music. Yet like the famous science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Revolutionary technologies like electrical power, airplanes and search engines have all changed the world in ways that were out of expectation. To some extent, Google’s second edition of their music search product, launched on March 30 by Hong Feng and his team, fulfilled the criteria in some way. When Google China’s president Li Kaifu [who by now quit Google] and executives from hundreds of record companies posed for a photograph at the media conference, people might have ignored the fact that this product transcended reality on at least two levels.
Google and Top100.cn provide complete music archives of over 140 record companies for download, which are totally free of charge and without Digital Rights Management (DRM). The product changes the way people interact with music. If search engines reduced the cost for people to find information, and community websites flattened peoples’ relations of “the six degrees of separation”, Google Music unprecedentedly enriched the way people find music. You can find a song through the name of artist, titles of the song, albums, or even a sentence of lyric, and you can also play the hottest songs from the charts. However, the most impressive breakthroughs are these two functions – one can have music recommendations according to difference of the tempo, tone, and timber; similar songs are recommended according to the timber of specific songs. Fresh experience it offers and the technical complexity in its realization makes it the most ambitious and imaginative work of Google after it entered China.
However, there’s still much room for improvement. Though the contract with record makers is only limited to the Chinese mainland, the record industry would not like to stick to this fixed pattern all along. “If it is proved to be a successful model in China, I would be surprised it won’t be promoted worldwide,” Sandy Monteiro, vice president of the Universal Music Group told Global Entrepreneur. Though no one knows how much time it will take, we might as well just imagine, some day in the future, when this free music service born in China enters the U.S. market, how would the largest online music stores – Apple’s iTunes App Store – have to compete?
Google’s previous attempts of developing a music search service were all aborted due to disagreements inside the company. Besides the copyright issue, Google’s decision makers were not really convinced that the proposals would help it surpass its rivals in this field. Then why did such a music search product pop out in China, where either technology innovation or property protection prevails?
Forget about the highly conclusive answers. Like all other innovation process, the course is complicated and not easy to define. You can also sum up with the timing, geographical and human reasons, yet it is no other than a series of consequences of human actions: the wildest fantasies, most carefully cultivated proposals, detailed communications inside the company, hard work of hundreds of thousands of codes to convert physical sound into arithmetic, and also some good luck ... all these factors combined have accomplished an “impossible mission.”
The Google Music homepage. Outside of China you can see it, but you can’t playback the songs.
Expanding the category for European music.
An album display. You can add a song to your current playlist, which is kept open in a second browser window, by clicking the plus icon. You can also find similar songs to the one being shown (with varying results quality).
The playlist. You can drag and drop items around. All songs can be fully played. A link at the bottom reminds you of the service’s terms. Many songs have lyrics coming with them to read along. You can also order ringtones for certain songs. A banner ad is displayed at the bottom of the window.
The “song screener” lets you find songs by adjusting slide rulers in the Flash app... if you can read Chinese, that is.
Tyranny of the “or”
It never has been a secret that Google China needed a music search product.
But it is also evident that, by normal business logic, search engines and music industry are run in totally opposite directions. While Google believe that all information has value and should be found with the lowest cost, record companies believe that the limited valuable information should be kept slightly and be charged for use every time. When Google is dedicated in digging out any information hidden in corners, record industry is busy contesting each other by spotting music genius in billion.
Different orientation decides that interaction between the two sides would hurt each other’s benefits. In China, Baidu is a successful example. It takes 60 percent market shares of search engine market, of which 15 percent is contributed by music search. Netizens can get large quantity of free music for download. The only problem is that the music has no copyrights. Record companies can hardly make profit out of it, which has constantly brought disputes between each other. But Baidu insists that the music they provide for download already existed on the internet, which helped it avoid legal responsibilities.
Google China did have such kind of temptations. In late 2006, Baidu won a lawsuit against International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. Right after that, Google purchased the video website YouTube which is also bothered by copyright disputes. It is at this occasion that staff of Google China suggested: shall we develop a music search product the way Baidu did?
But this hasn’t become an option. “There is a saying in English called Tyranny of the ‘or’, which means that people can easily get themselves stuck in a kind of confrontation between two opposing options – you might as well choose to make it legal but with fee, or rather, free of charge but illegal. We don’t want to surrender to this tyranny of the ‘or’. We made it, with free and legal music,” Li Kaifu told Global Entrepreneur during an exclusive interview.
The first problem they should solve then was how to convey their sincerity.
The difficulty for internet industry and record industry to cooperate does not only root in their different positions, but also in communication difficulties. The two sides speak different industry languages, and the aggressive lawyers arguing for their legal rights made the negotiation break sooner than you expect.
In September 2006, Google China’s then chief strategy officer Guo Quji was introduced by a lucky chance to Chen Ge, the founder and CEO of Top100.cn which was invested in by basketball star Yao Ming. According to engineers’ impression, Chen’s style of eloquence would not make things any better. Yet Guo found the other side of Chen. “He has character of a ‘preacher.’ If you are running late for the appointment, he would be waiting for you at the entrance of the company till you come. If he writes you an e-mail and doesn’t get response, he would continue to write another the day after in politeness.”
As it turned out, Chen’s emotional quotient is out of expect. He never lost temper once through the whole process of negotiation, and he could always stay calm and find consensus for both, which made him sort of insulation that eliminated contradictions lying between Google and record companies. Before founding Top100.cn, Chen set up the company Pulai Music, which had made records and organized concerts for rock star Cui Jian. This made Chen familiar with the language of the music circle, which qualified him for the role of interpreter between the two sides. Chen and his Top100 has never provided music without copyrights. The two sides started with the same “no original sin” gesture into the record industry.
Under Chen’s recommendation, Google China contacted Sony, Universal, and EMI music respectively in November 2006, December 2006 and January 2007, which was right at a turbulent time for Google China. Li Kaifu, who was then reported to step down, led his team and made it clear the cooperation with Top100.
However, Li’s decision cannot stand for Google. Decision for such a product should be reported to Google’s U.S. headquarters, approvals from the two founders and the CEO are needed.
How to make this product proposal, which had been constantly denied, prevail this time? It should give credit to Google China’s wisdom of a roundabout way in communication. They head on with permits authorized within the mainland scope, and reported stage accomplishment and kept delivering the message that what they were working on was worthwhile. Trust from the headquarters was accumulated.
The first step was to make Top100 part of Google China’s interest. There was no doubt that Google had to invest in Top100 if they planned to carry on the music search business in long term. In February 2007, Li Kaifu, and James Mi, then in charge of merger & acquisition and investment of Greater China, reported this purchase plan to CEO Eric Schmidt. They didn’t boldly announce the whole music search program, but just illustrated the importance of this deal, and by this chance, introduced the meaning of music service to Chinese users. Schmidt, who had always been supportive for China business approved the plan very quickly.
It was not until November 2007 that the music search program was finally reported to the two founders. During the past several months, the team for music search in Google China has developed bold paths – cooperation between Google and Top100 had been divided into six steps. The Onebox plug-in among search results launched in August 2008, and the search page launched on March 30, 2009 are only the first two steps. [Checking the archives I can see the Google Music page went live around August 2008. -Ed.]
“The co-founder Larry Page only asked one question and signed the project with CEO Schmidt. The whole course took only a few minutes. This became a little legend for Google China.”
The biggest challenge was that Google had long defined its global strategy as search, ads, and apps. Music search should not become an area to be devoted with much energy. But Li and his team also made a convincing explanation: the content would be provided by Top100 and Google China only acts the role as platform, which doesn’t go against the search-dominating strategy; in addition, the lack of a music search product might make them lose loyal users. As a backup plan, they even proposed to buy a new domain m.cn, hoping that it would help lighten the color of Google.
The co-founder Larry Page only asked one question and signed the project with CEO Schmidt. The whole course took only a few minutes. This became a little legend for Google China.
A destined miracle?
Even with the permit, Google China’s investment in Top100 had been very cautious. Mi drafted a very detailed investment structure. Millions of dollars investment had been divided into four rounds. The second round of investment came only after Top100 signed another record company. As it turned out, Chen is a very reliable person. By September 2007, he had signed agreements with three record companies including Sony, Universal and EMI for audition of DRM music free of charge.
Details of the negotiation that had not been revealed officially reflected wisdom of Google China’s pattern in cooperating with Top100. For instance, to avoid hasty in cooperation, Top100’s agreement with record companies didn’t limit to advertisement shares. According to an insider, every contract Top100 signed with record companies was very complicated. Apart from the ad dividend, record companies can get fee for download of each song and base revenue for each year, all paid by Top100.
Apart from that, record companies had chance to get options in Top100, which put the website into a virtuous development cycle. For one thing, record companies then had more patience for Top100’s product. For another, more shareholders brought hope for Top100 in developing into a leading force in China’s music market. The expectation that the website will lead a dominating role some day was irresistible to record companies for better financial payback.
However, the most important thing is to change the idea lying deep in the music market.
Digital music brought convenience in duplication, and time of relying solely on a single album had gone. Artists have more options such as representation and concerts. Record companies are also changing their role from making music to marketing and promotion.
This was just where Google’s negotiation team hit the point. By putting forward the idea that CD works only to loyal fans while a search engine is a better choice for artists to promote themselves. A search engine also has the advantage in assembling music fans located in different parts of the world, which for certain lowers the cost in targeted marketing. [Note Google Music China uses geolocation to ban IPs from other countries. -Ed.]
Google itself could serve as a good example. In 2006, the second year Google opened China market, it made a revenue of 100 million dollars through its 20 percent shares in China. And according to Chen Ge, Chinese record industry made altogether 50 million dollars in 2008.
A standing obstacle was the issue of DRM that limits copying of the music and broadcasting might be technically strained, which would bring inconvenience to users. In October 2007, Google made a clear statement that Top100 must get authorization of the music without DRM.
Google’s music search intended to be launched on March 2008 was postponed several times. The time from October 2007 to May 2008 was called “the dark period” – no one could ensure their vision could be realized, and even Chen Ge himself could not bear this pressure.
“[T]he manager made promise that he would lift the DRM standard before leaving ... The door to the music market was finally opened, by the gatekeeper who was about to leave his position.”
It was suggested that Top100 invent a new copyright management standard affiliated to the DRM, which wouldn’t affect user experience in China. Yet the idea of borderline practice was denied by Google which had a clear record. There was still one way left – to provide a streaming media player, but Google gave up the plan, for the lack of download function might destroy user experience anyway.
The turning point came on May 10, 2008 when Chen Ge and Guo Quji visited the digital music section of EMI. At the Abbey Road Studio where albums of Beatles, Queen and U2 were recorded, the manager announced that he would lose his job in about a month. EMI had spotted Google’s chief information officer Douglas Merrill to take his place. Yet the manager made the promise that he would lift the DRM standard before leaving.
The door to the music market was finally opened, by the gatekeeper who was about to leave his position.
EMI’s attitude brought a chain reaction from other record giants. In spite of these progress, it was not until in early 2009 that Li Kaifu finally got consensus with Sony, which owns 40 percent of Chinese-language songs.
“It is a miracle that we finally made it,” Guo Quji who had left Google and started his own business told Global Entrepreneur. It took Google two years to turn the idea into reality, and lift all the obstacles. Many involvers, in Google or record companies, had left, but the deal was accomplished eventually.
Maybe the success was destined. Apart from traditional business wisdom, some wild illusions were needed to fulfill this impossible mission.
Assembly
On August 5, 2008, in an office named “Kai Xin (in Chinese: happiness) of Google China, people were not in mood of happiness.
Google’s first edition of music search was about to be put online. The music search development team had increased from one engineer to 10 people, which was not a small team in Google. They had gone through the long and lonely period of waiting: after March 2008, the product might be released every month, but was postponed each time. It was depressing that they might have to wait for another month, through the excitement of the national Olympics feast.
According to the plan, they should put the product online on 10 o’clock. If everything went well, they might go out for lunch and celebrate.
But accident came sooner than they expected. They were freaked out that Chinese users cannot visit the page while feedback from India and New York was coming in. According to the plan, Google Music was to be opened just to China, and recognition of IP address would help that. This accident might become a laughing stock, and what’s even worse, they might lose trust from record companies for this matter.
Not knowing what else to do, the team took the product offline and checked every line of code. While word spread on the internet that Google launched its music search, the project managers didn’t even know when exactly the product would finally be put online. “If things go well, it might be ready in half an hour. If not, 12 hours would be also possible,” said the product manager Hong Feng. Hong was sitting for hours in front of the video conference camera at Shanghai office, blank in his head with his face spotted on the wall.
It was already eight o’clock in the evening when they finally found out the problem – code conflicts with another product – and solved it.
It should not be overstated if we say it is a product that suffered with many setbacks. “We had many similar moments in the past year and half. We all acknowledge the difficulty and impossibleness lying in it. What we have is the bold determination to make it happen,” Tang Ting, the fronted technology leader of the music product said.
Here is another side of the story. When Li Kaifu, Guo Quji and Mi Qun were taking efforts to clear the road, these engineers were working on building a bridge for users to get better music experience. For a very long period of time, everything seemed uncertain, not only the product’s destiny but also its functions. It was just due to this kind of uncertainty that helped create a big surprise in the end.
The first person involved in this program is the product manager Hong Feng. Guo Qujin felt that Honog is a very good person to talk to when the product was still an illusion. Hong has this pure curiousity for things, and when the things come into shape, he pursues perfection of every detail.
“To avoid developing a product that annoys users is easy. But creating a product that doesn’t make you unhappy isn’t equal to creating one that makes you happy!” Hong told Global Entrepreneur. He spoke slowly and always made metaphors. He likes to make expressions of thoughts more vivid, which might have relations to his art background in primary school. He likes to make the product idea visual too.
When he imagined that all music of mankind is digitally formatted, he felt himself floating in the sea, with his hands reaching out for bubbles of songs.
Yet how to let a man under the sea get able to reach the bubble they want? This is a problem for engineering majordomo Lin Bin and his team to solve.
Lin is obsessed in telling his experience of joining Google. In September 2006, Lin, then working at Microsoft Research, met his old acquaintance Li Kaifu on a business trip, and asked Li, “why don’t you consider music search?” “Sure we would,” Li agreed. “Why don’t you join and take charge?” Lin joined a few months later.
Lin selected three fresh employees to joint this “Project M” program. Tang Mengya, a lively girl from Hang Zhou, and Zou Zhensheng, who is timid but loves singing, took charge of how the product would be presented. Zhao Qisheng, known for steadiness and patience, was devoted to back-end database and communication with Top100. In the earliest three months, they didn’t even start writing code, awaiting permit from the founders. Even Li Kaifu recalled that the engineers were in “the most pathetic” position. They still had too many obstacles to clear. To avoid frustration in the team, Lin had to communicate in a way of “reporting the good news but not the bad.” When Lin looked back, he was very grateful to them, “They knew how much uncertainty there was.”
When the program was finally approved, Tang Ting, who was then working on video search at Google China, offered to join. Tang grew up overseas and when he applied to come back and work in China, he was intended to do something with more Chinese characteristics. His interest for this program also came from people’s criticism of China’s lack of copyright protection. Tang brought in a big Northeaster Han Zhun. As it turned out, he also brought carefulness in correcting code with patience and strength.
But they still needed one person to bring technological breakthroughs for the product.
In early 2007, Li Kaifu made a speech of Google China in the New York office, hoping to attract more top engineers back to China. After his speech, a delicate girl found him. This female engineer in New York office was Hu Ning, and she was also a schoolmate of Li in Carnegie Mellon University. After a short chat, Li suggested that Hu Ning meet with Beijing’s Lin Bin.
When Lin Bin and Hu Ning finally sat together and talked, Lin found that Hu participated in a music search product when she was an intern in Google back in 2004. Hu also studied in frequency processing and message retrieval. This was a big surpise for Lin. Hu agreed to move back to China and devote scientific and technological achievements to Google’s music search.
Play by ear
When you get large quantity of music, how do you deal with it?
The simplest way is to change it into a large FTP for anyone to visit and download. However, this FTP looks like a library without a librarian. It only has value when you know which book you exactly want to read.
A more advanced way is to make computer a librarian. The computer would play similar songs under the same category. A company named Pandora is a good example. They marked different songs by 400 tags. When you select your favorite song and play, it will also play all the other songs under the same tag. But this looks like a one-way road. Human decisions are smart only in terms of limited music archives. If the music archives are enlarged to millions of songs, Pandora’s style would not be that effective, for we cannot say all users have the same appreciation and understanding as the one who pasted tags.
“Hu’s work was to teach computer to ’listen to the music.’ Different from the way humans listen to music, Hu had to convert the physical features of the music into numbers, and the computer would compare and work on them.”
Is there possibility that Google can teach the computer to become the cleverest librarian? On the one hand, it should know the features of different music well. On the other, it should make customized recommendations.
Computers must learn a lot to have the common sense human has. Though it wouldn’t be as accurate and effective as Pandora’s way at first, it has much room for improvement.
Hu’s work was to teach computer to “listen to the music.” Different from the way humans listen to music, Hu had to convert the physical features of the music into numbers, and the computer would compare and work on them.
For instance, it would be easy to recognize the timber difference between drum and flute. If this difference is converted into numbers – suppose drum to be marked by 2046 while flute marked by 1984, computers without ears can easily separate them. Under well-rounded arithmetic, singers with similar tone colors should be marked in similar numbers: Faye Wong, the Cranberries of Ireland, and Bjork of Iceland might only have difference of 0.1 in numbers.
Then computer might draw a boundless map for all the music. Though computers are only comparing a series of numbers, users would find piano, guitar and rock music in organized categories.
The real calculation is much more complicated than this. Hu needed to convert a song back to frequency spectrum, cut it into thousands of segments in units of hundred millisecond, and take out over 100 features. There might be a drumbeat in this unit and a cymbal beat in the next. You draw all the marks of each song on a paper, and when you put two pieces of such papers together, you see some overlapping and marks in similar positions. You can tell that the two pictures are alike, and the two songs are similar.
It was already a very interesting thought, but Hong Feng wanted something better. After his experience in development of Google Finance, he asked Hu Ning whether there was a way for users to make simple clicks and find different answers on the page, like the way stock search went.
Hong’s thought was very direct viewing for investors: you can get a list of companies of p/e over six, or rather profit margin of over 30 percent. Yet Hu doesn’t agree with this, for music has no p/e or profit margin and users cannot make choices based on that.
But Hong didn’t want to give up this thought easily. He took two weeks in convincing Hu that music, though without clear standard like p/e, would be more fun if there could be some interaction with users.
As a result, two new features were added inito the tight schedule of Google Music’s second edition, including recommendation of similar songs led by Hu Ning, and seletion of songs according to different features.
Lu Yang, doctor of Tsinghua University who joined Google last July, joined Hu in this new direction. The young man who studied signal processing in school didn’t expect to pick up his major when he joined this search engine company. He was required to read dozens of theses by Hu and had to read mathematic books for research. When searching profiles of engineers around the globe, Lin Bin found another engineer in Zurich who had similar academic background with Hu and Lu. Lin invited him to take part in this program.
It wa already a difficulty to find standards applicable to all the songs. People might think that ordinary users could make selections by difference of rhythm, but it was a detour in technical sense.
Lu Yang had experience when he listened to the same song with the Zurich colleague through video conference. The two beat time to the music, and gathered data for about 1,000 songs. The impassible barrio is the multiformity of songs. It’s hard to find the tempo for those songs with light background music. Some songs don’t have the same tempo from beginning to end. People even have different understanding of tempo. The computer had an accuracy of 80 percent in making a distinction of songs in different tempo. Though it is already a hard achievement academically, the chance of one mistake in five songs is not acceptable in practical application. Under these circumstances, Lu suggested that they make distinction from mild to strong, instead of by tempo.
Hu also had difficulty in the similar-song direction. She saw satisfactory performance with her sample product, which covered several thousands of songs, but was frustrated when the range increased to tens of thousands. She had to start over again.
Back in school, she only needed to deal with 100 songs for quantity analysis in order to publish a thesis, but now she was facing hundreds of thousands songs, which was a huge project. Now it was a totally different matter. Chinese language songs and foreign songs of similar timber should be marked differently in numbers. There were also some special cases, e.g. rap music, which was also a big challenge.
Hu Ning and Lu Yang found a simple but effective way to do this huge project. They worked out a solution in small quantity, and made adjustments each time when the quantity was enlarged. Many of the valid code they wrote before had to be abandoned when they moved on to the next stage. It is said that the amount of abandoned code was ten times the one that was left.
The system is relatively stable after processing over 50,000 songs, and they now have 4096 characteristic roots. Somehow it is a product destined for Google – to process 300,000 songs each time takes thousands of computers working tens of hours. Not all companies can do that.
Three weeks before the launch of the revised edition, Li Kaifu and Hong Feng were finally ready to present their work to CEO Eric Schmidt. According to attendees at the presentation, Schmidt, who has rich experience in product development and has a keen eye, commented: “My Chinese colleagues, is there any sharp question for me to ask?”
Indeed, it is a surprising product for Google, no matter in terms of China or the globe.
Will it help Google win back some market shares? It is yet too early to come to this conclusion.
A person close to Google shared his worries with Global Entrepreneur. Given to the bad economic environment this year, Top100 and record companies might not be able to have a good payback as they expect. A more important question is whether Google has the competence to improve and promote the product. In the view of critics, though Google launched quite a few products last year, none of them brought excitement to the market. For instance, Google-Kingsoft Powerword, which is no doubt a good product with great position, quieted down gradually in the past year.
Good news is that everyone of them know there is still much space for improvement, from Li Kaifu to each engineer. According to the plan, after Google Music made its debut, there are still product advertisements, music player and community services to be developed.
Above all, by changing the original competition rules, Google finally filled up its blank and confronts Baidu directly. After three years’ localization, Li Kaifu is now able to sit down, and play himself a song on the internet, with his own product.
A Trademark Search Engine
Trademarkia is a search engine specifically for trademarks. Enter google, for instance, to find out what kind trademarks are available (including abandoned trademarks – note the status column). To fire this engine, the makers tell me they “received data in various legacy formats from a US government agency, the USPTO. We then normalized and standardized all [data] sets.”
[Thanks Fred!]
Thursday, September 17, 2009
A JavaScript-Based NES Emulator
If you want to see what Google Chrome is capable of, check out JSNES, a JavaScript and Canvas based NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) emulator. To blow up the somewhat small display size, hit Ctrl+Plus a couple of times. Note theoretically JSNES supports some other browsers too (like Firefox), but the author Ben Firshman says they’re “hardly playable” and so he highly recommends Chrome.
[Via Reddit.]
By Acquiring ReCaptcha, Google Acquired a Crowd Computer Along the Way
As previously mentioned, Google has acquired reCaptcha, a company providing those hard-to-read Captcha tests to tell robots and humans apart on websites (e.g. to protect a comment form against automated spamming). The twist with the highly popular reCaptcha is that it’s also used to help turning scanned books into searchable digital text... something Google aims to apply for their books and newspaper digitization projects, too, to help with the quality of their existing OCR (Optical Character Recognition)
For all the websites out there using reCaptcha – Google says there are above 100,000 – this now means you’ll also help Google’s efforts now. (You continue to get something in return, of course: a form of free spam protection for your site.) The reCaptcha technology might have been feasible to duplicate for Google, but the installed existing user base for reCaptcha is possibly the actual gold Google was after. ReCaptcha mentions they’re serving 30 million Captchas daily and that generally, people spend roughly 10 seconds on a captcha – that’s quite some human computing power Google snapped up there.
Technically, here’s how reCaptcha works. Captchas (short for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) are deliberately distorted to make them hard to read, so that they can’t be easily solved with existing OCR algorithms. At reCaptcha – which webmasters can easily plug-in to their existing forms and configure via e.g. a JavaScript API – you’ll always be presented with two, not just one words. The trick is that reCaptcha already knows one of the words, but wants you to help solve the other word (if enough other people solve that other word similarly, the system gains confidence that it now knows what that word reads). So you can say one word is the actual Captcha test word... while the other word deliberately spends more of your time than needed for the robot test by letting you turn books into text. It’s these extra seconds that you spend solving the secondary, unknown word that make up the CPU of that crowd computer Google now owns.
Right now, Google can use this crowd computer to improve searching and highlighting text for projects like Google Books. Improving by correcting old words, increasing their confidence threshold, or cracking new unknown words – and perhaps letting their software learn from its mistakes, or by running automated tests against reCaptcha when they try out new versions of their OCR. But who’s to say that in the future, we’ll not be solving other captcha tasks? Telling humans and bots apart is not necessarily restricted to text-reading tests. There are other puzzles out there which are tough for today’s AIs, but easy for humans, which might benefit a Google project.
For instance, a captcha may show you a thumbnail collection of a dozen images and ask you to click on all images showing a cat. (I’m not sure how feasible this particular example would be for Google, but it’s just to illustrate the general different directions captchas can take.) For most images Google knows whether it’s a cat or not, but for one image, Google only suspects that it’s a cat based on keywords found on the same page the pic was hosted on. If many people click that picture, Google may gain confidence that it’s indeed a cat (or conversely that it isn’t), and rank it accordingly in Google Images.
For such alternative captcha systems, take a look at Microsoft’s Asirra project, KittenAuth, or Google’s own foray into the field. These are straightforward applications; even more power could be unleashed if any company figures out a possibility to break up bigger questions into easy humanly solvable chunks, which would – after being solved – be merged to form the deeper answer. (Perhaps both the process of breaking up the question, as well as merging the individual solutions together again, could be themselves human computing powered.)
Now, it’s worth keeping in mind other, older parts of Google’s crowd computer. Here are some examples:
- whenever you mark a Gmail message as spam, you potentially help Google to determine what spam looks like
- whenever you click on a Google search result (and then either continue your search afterwards, or be gone to the other site for good), you’ll give Google some indicators to the usefulness of the site
- your searches may power prediction machines for things like flu trends; they may also help Google build a “database of intentions”
- calling 1-800-GOOG-411 allows US users to say what business they are looking for and to be then connected with that business, but the reason Google really did this, according to Google’s Marissa Mayer, was to “to build a great speech-to-text model ... that we can use for all kinds of different things, including video search”
- when you include Google Analytics in your site, you could help Google spot global traffic trends and patterns
- a game called Google Image Labeler directly helps Google to associate the pics of Google Images with keywords
Google can potentially use any and all interaction with their sites as data points to power yet other calculations. What’s the hottest spot in town (as a purely hypothetical example)? Let’s see what areas on Google Maps those people who fall into the younger age group – determined by their Google search patterns – look at most often recently! ... What are the most popular websites out there right now? Let’s see which URLs are being forwarded the most in Gmail right now. ... Who are your friends? Let’s look at which Google Latitude users – those who allow their location to be tracked – are often found in your vicinity.
There’s nothing inherently bad about this; user attention as well as user information continues to be the currency in many parts of the online world, like it is the case with the ads Google displays on search results (many a webmaster’s sites are financed through ads, too). Often we prefer paying with attention (or sharing our information) to paying with money; it feels “free.” Applying a broad definition of the word Google’s programs are not free though – it’s just that you’ve signed an inherent contract with Google to use their apps only as long as you trade in your brain cycles in return. Google’s terms of service point 17 translates this to legalese: “Some of the Services are supported by advertising revenue ... In consideration for Google granting you access to and use of the Services, you agree that Google may place such advertising on the Services.” With reCaptchas too the agreement is built into the technology, as you cannot display only the single test word needed for that “Turing test.”
As it is, perhaps Google is not only owner of the biggest electronic computer in the world (their giant server farm), but also owner of the biggest crowd computer in the world. If this sounds scary, remember your attention also acts as a vote – you might think of the alternative model in which Google is simply a building block in civilization’s computer, granted permission to handle a large part of the calculations as long as it works.
Please comment in the existing thread.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Google Acquires reCAPTCHA
By Tony Ruscoe
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, “A common type of CAPTCHA requires that the user type letters or digits from a distorted image that appears on the screen.” (The image you see above is an easy one. It’s not unusual for users to reload the CAPTCHA until they finally get one they can read!)
The reCAPTCHA website explains that they’re currently helping to digitize old editions of the New York Times, but according to Google’s announcement, they plan to use it to improve their Google Books and Google News Archive Search.
See also: Google Researches New Captcha Approach In Which Users Rotate Images Upward
[Via Official Google Blog. Image by Google. Thanks DPic!]
Quotes About Google From 2002 and 2003
Aaron Swartz’s Google Weblog, started in 2002, was one of or the earliest blog covering Google. Here are some semi-random snippets from the past of the Google Weblog archive to give you an impression of the news back then.
«Now in beta is Google News, a special search for the latest headlines. It moves Google’s old “Headline News” page onto its front page, and uses the same story-matching technology to merge relates stories in your search results. Google’s play catch-up to Daypop in this field – it’ll be interesting to see if they let you search weblogs soon.» (2002-03-17)
«Andreas Heldal-Lund has received a notice from Google stating that they have removed the popular Scientology debunking xenu.net from their index.» (2002-03-21)
«Ian Macdonald speaks about a new SOAP API for Google. (SOAP is an XML protocol that allows programmers to automatically query systems thru a friendly interface.) This is surprising, considering that Google has shut down their XML interface. [e.g. http://www.google.com/xml?q=foo, apparently]» (2002-04-07)
«With little fanfare, Google has launched Google Answers (BETA) where you can ask and answer questions. They’re looking for paid researchers to help answer the questions. “As a Researcher, you work from your own home and computer to answer questions for Google Answers. You earn 75% of the price set for a question that you answer.” To become a researcher you must write a short essay on your qualifications and answer some sample questions.» (2002-04-18)
«I’m receiving lots of reports that the Google Compute feature has been enabled on all Google Toolbars. Google Compute uses your computer’s spare processing time to solve problems if global significance. The current project, Folding@home, has your computer simulate protein folding» (2002-10-23)
«Google Labs has two new projects: Google Viewer lets you view the web pages of your search results, in a slideshow fashion. Google Webquotes annotates results with quotes from other sites.» (2002-12-10)
«New, from Google: Froogle!» (2002-12-11)
«For those of you who don’t remember the SearchKing flap, here’s a quick summary: SearchKing sold links on high-PageRank sites, Google lowered their PageRank, SearchKing sued.» (2003-01-10)
«Google Buys Blogger ... Google is apparently going to be hosting Blogger’s free (ad-supported) BlogSpot blogs. So you can get ultra-reliable hosting (when was the last time you remember Google going down?) for free!» (2003-02-15)
«Google’s Content-Targeted text ads (the text ads that appear when you search) are now available on other sites, including blogspot (now that they host it) ... If your site receives more than 20 million page views a month, you could run Google text ads on it too.» (2003-03-05)
«From Google Spokesperson, Nate Tyler: “Today, Google introduced a new advanced search feature that enables users to search not only for a particular keyword, but also for its synonyms. This is accomplished by placing a ~ character directly in front of the keyword in the search box."» (2003-08-04)
«Google is beta testing a search counter for frequent searchers. It tracks how many times you visit Google.com.» (2003-09-30)
[The photo from 2006 is CC licensed by Jacob Appelbaum.]
"It wasn’t that we intended to build a search engine. We built a ranking system to deal with annotations." (Larry Page, 2003)
In 2003, Brad DeLong quoted from a talk given by Google co-founder Larry Page. Larry said:
It wasn’t that we intended to build a search engine. We built a ranking system to deal with annotations. We wanted to annotate the web – build a system so that after you’d viewed a page you could click and see what smart comments other people had about it. But how do you decide who gets to annotate Yahoo? We needed to figure out how to choose which annotations people should look at, which meant that we needed to figure out which other sites contained comments we should classify as authoritative. Hence PageRank ...
Only later did we realize that PageRank was much more useful for search than for annotation...
Here’s a Screenshot of Google in 2002, Viewed With a Browser from 1991
The image is by Splode.com, and the browser in question is WorldWideWeb (renamed to Nexus later on), created by the web’s original inventor Tim Berners-Lee. Note the menu entry “Style” to the left (which is where the NeXTStep operating system put app menus) – it allowed you to load a user stylesheet to define what the page should look like. At the time, Tim figured it would be up to the specific browser to handle layout, though, so he didn’t formally publish the syntax for the stylesheet language used.
Syntax Samples of "Cascading HTML Style Sheets" (CHSS), a 1994 Work in Progress Predating Today’s CSS
The following are excerpts from Håkon W. Lie’s Cascading HTML style sheets – a proposal from October 1994 (also see some historical background; note today, Håkon works for Opera Software):
h1.font.size = 24pt 100%
Explanation: “A one-statement style sheet that sets the font size of the h1 element ... The percentage at the end of the line indicates what degree of influence that is requested (here 100%). If this is the initial style sheet (i.e. the one under user control), this request can be fulfilled, i.e. all headline elements will be rendered using helvetica. If the statement comes in a later style sheet, any unclaimed influence is granted.”
AGE > 3d ? background.color = pale_yellow : background.color = white
Explanation: “In this example, parameters from the user’s environment is taken into account when determining the style sheet values. The C-style syntax of the first statement reads: If the document is older than three days, the background color should be pale yellow, else the backgound color should be white.”
RELEVANCE > 80 ? h1.font.size *= 1.5
Explanation: “In newspapers, the size of the headlines tell us how important the editor believes the article is. As digital agents and personalized information filters become available, the typography of HTML documents should also be influenced by the relevance of each document for each individual user. Given a relevance factor, the above statement multiplies the font size of h1 by 1.5.”
speech.*.weight = 35db
speech.em.weight = 40db
Explanation: “Current browsers consider the computer screen to be the primary presentation target, but HTML – different from the page description languages – has the potential of supporting many output media, e.g. paper, speech and braille ... The example above sets values for the speech medium.”
font.size *= 2 100%
Explanation: “This single statement style sheet will, if given the influence, double the font size of all paragraphs. A style sheet like this could conveniently be merged in when the user selects ’double font size’ from a pulldown menu.”
space.left = 0pt
space.right = 0pt
space.above = 4pt
space.below = 4pt
Explanation: “[S]et the white space surrounding paragraphs”
window.foreground = black
window.width = 400px
window.height = REAL_HEIGHT - 50px
No specific explanation was given for this bit, but the window foreground may be the text color.
align.style = left
head.align.style = center
print.head.align.style = right
Explanation: “[T]he first statement establishes a default left alignment for all elements in all media. The second statement changes the setting for headline elements (h1 .. h6) in all media. The last statement is more specific; it requests headlines to be right-aligned when printed. print is itself a group consisting of e.g. print_color and print_mono.”
Trying to Improve YouTube’s Favicon by Applying Subpixel Techniques
Miha at Typophile.com tried improving the readability of the YouTube favicon – that 16x16 thing sitting in places like the browser address bar – by going into subpixel improvements. The results are shown above (original to the left, new version to the right). Miha says YouTube’s current icon is “so unreadable” and adds, “If you want to be suprised: white text on red is not really white, it is purple & yellow!” Which icon do you think is better?
[Via Waxy.]
Swiss Privacy Concerns Over Google Street View
A Swiss privacy protection official (Hanspeter Thür of the EDÖB) asks Google for their Street View service to (my translation, though the auto-translation from French – as opposed to the auto-translation from German – is superb):
- “deliver a better solution to make faces and license plates completely unrecognizable,
- put special focus on anonymizing in areas with sensitive facilities like e.g. hospitals, schools or prisons,
- delete records of private streets if no permission was granted,
- delete records of enclosed locations (court yards, gardens) and in the future, decrease the height of the mounted camera,
- inform the concerned villages one week before photos are being shot, and one week before they photos are being put online, and that Google
- put no new images of Swiss streets live until all legal concerns have been clarified.”
Some of these seem odd to me at first glance (like the one about anonymizing schools and hospitals – Google is shooting publicly visible space there, so at first glance trying to prevent this seems both paranoid as well as futile). Google is given 30 days to clarify whether they want to accept these recommendations. If Google rejects the recommendation, the matter will may be moved up a place in the Swiss federal administrative hierarchy.
[Thanks TomHTML!]
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Bing Visual Search Feature
Microsoft’s search engine Bing has a new visual search feature. It presents you with categories like US politicians, popular celebrities, cell phones, yoga poses, film legends, new cars, dog breeds and more. Drilling in to a category will show a dynamically presented list of thumbnails, which when clicked on will return more text results.
If a particular featured category is exactly what you were looking for – UFC Fighters? – this may be a nice place to bookmark. More generally speaking however I found the whole thing doing rather poorly so far, for a couple of reasons:
- The result set is not easily searchable. I was presented with a couple of book covers so I typed google above to have it show only covers from books about Google. That would have been kind of neat, but it didn’t work.
- The scope of data is simply disappointing. When trying to restrict my books exploration to the category “Comics & Graphic Novels” it displayed only a single item (the Watchmen trade paperback). Restricting to a villain type in the category 100 Heroes and Villains returns 3 characters (perhaps not surprisingly when you start out with only 100 items). For a time waster this is fun, but at this small scale I don’t yet see long term searching or researching usefulness.
- The whole thing needs the Microsoft Silverlight plugin to run. On first glance there does not seem to be anything that couldn’t have been done in Flash (perhaps even DHTML), so this seems to be a strategic decision rather than a company pushing the limits of what you can do inside the browser. As such, having to run an executable before seeing results (if you don’t yet have Silverlight installed) hurts usability quite a bit.
- I found myself expecting a larger image when clicking on the thumbnail of an item, but the results were then mostly text only. Perhaps the flow wouldn be interrupted less if a larger image would be appearing next to the results, I’m not sure. (The site also doesn’t load too fast when moving back and forth, but that may be due to my location here in China.)
Perhaps next to Microsoft pushing its plugin on me, it’s the context of this being part of a supposedly more generalized search engine that I find disappointing. As a sort of standalone microsite it’s really fun, but when it comes to the major search engines I find scalable approaches more interesting.
[Thanks WebSonic and Juha-Matti! Also see Microsoft’s announcement post.]
Search Engine Design Back Then
In 1997, the year after its launch, Hotbot featured a scary amount of interface elements.
The Six Revisions blog takes a look at search engine designs from the 1990s, comparing them with today. Oh those were cluttered days. [Thanks WebSonic!]
A Gallery of Google Health Oneboxes (Partnering with Google Inc may well be the ultimate form of SEO)
Google is showing Google Health oneboxes since a while. If such a onebox is triggered by your health related query – from the US* – it will always be the top result (below ads, but above what would otherwise be the first organic ad). The top results are now less diverse, as they all (or at least the ones I checked) come from health content provider A.D.A.M., who probably partners with Google (at least their entries are fully reproduced at Google’s health site, which hints at some type of agreement. Note other sites are too displayed in the onebox but in less clickable positions).
Below are 15 examples of searches that show a Google Health onebox – I’m including the top non-onebox result in the screenshots for reference so we know which site got pushed down (for better or worse for the user, you be the judge... what’s rather safe to say is that it’s worse for the traffic of whichever site gets pushed down):
Searching for migraine (also see the landing page)
stroke
tuberculosis
back pain
allergies
bursitis
asthma
lyme diseases
cancer
multiple sclerosis
osteoporosis
arthritis
diabetes
depression
fibromyalgia
In an interview with Playboy, Google co-founder Larry Page in 2004 said, “We want you to come to Google and quickly find what you want. Then we’re happy to send you to the other sites. In fact, that’s the point. The portal strategy tries to own all of the information.” DMarsch in August at Search Engine Land comments:
People freaked out about Knols, thinking that Google was getting into the publishing business, and would quickly succumb to the temptation of boosting their results higher. Knols fizzled and that didn’t happen, but it happened quite suddenly with Google Health. Using this as a model, there’s no reason Google couldn’t license bodies of content and immediately boost themselves to the top.
How does this not damage their claim that they organize, rather than build content? Or that their algorithm is responsible for ranking results rather than which partners or content they want to promote?
What do you think?
[Thanks Russell!]
*You can append &gl=us to the URL if outside the US.
Google Russia’s Chief Technology Officer Leaving Company
Yakov at the Quintura blog writes:
Jennifer Trelewicz, who was CTO of Google Russia, has left Google to join Russia’s leading online portal Mail.ru as Deputy CTO. Jennifer was CTO of Google in Russia for two years. Before that, she worked as Director of IBM’s first R&D lab in Russia.
Followed by rejection of its acquisition of Begun contextual advertising service in Russia last November, Google has been struggling to gain a significant market share for its search engine in the Europe’s 4th largest internet market.
Yakov continues that “Looking forward to doing an IPO, Mail.ru keeps attracting top executives from leading internet companies in Russia”.
[Thanks Yakov! Original image by IBM.]
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 about the Judean People’s Front – is that “Users own the data they store in any of Google’s products. Our team’s goal is to give users greater control by making it easier for them to move data in and out.” Thus the team wants to “make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products,” they say.
In a blog post Google clarifies that “a liberated product is one which has built-in features that make it easy (and free) to remove your data from the product in the event that you’d like to take it elsewhere.” When users are locked in, on the other hand, Google says there’s a strong temptation on the product makers side “to be complacent and focus less on making your product better.” Google says they’ve already “liberated” over half of all Google products – like Blogger and Gmail – and in the future want to liberate Google Sites and Google Docs as well.
Any company believing their software can beat competing software when fairly compared does well to push for a fair market, where switching is easy. By releasing export features for their own products they don’t only take away from fears people may have when contemplating a switch to their software. They also create an environment that pushes other companies (like Microsoft in particular) to release export features of their own, helping users leave competing products. That type of environment is a win for users.
Time will tell if Google’s own replacement of the lock-in strategy will become the strategy of heavily cross-connecting its services: for instance, connecting Gmail with Google Docs, Google Calendar with Google Maps, Google search with Blogger, and so on (all things which happen or did happen in the past). Because that too can convince a company to “focus less on making your product better”... as the company can then try switch over their massive user base, if they have one, through the effects the cross-connection comfort brings to users (say you may slightly prefer Acme Docs over Google Docs, but your favorite email client Google Mail just doesn’t offer to open attachments in Acme Docs, so you find sticking with Acme too bothersome to justify its slight advantage). Once we’re truly looking at an OS inside the browser, perhaps we’ll also want a way to liberate our online OS file type associations.
[Thanks DPic and Niniane!]
*I can’t directly access that site from China, as seems to be the case with (several? all? some?) newish domains.
Second Google UFO Logo
Google is continuing its UFO logo doodles with one showing a crop circle. The logo is already live in e.g. China (the Chinese search it links to translated to “crop circle”), though I can’t see it on the US homepage yet. The file is named “goog_e.gif”, whereas the previous UFO doodle was named “go_gle”. For more on the meaning behind these doodles, see the forum discussion and Ionut’s article on this.
[Thanks Gkp and George!]
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 larger, readable image of that article. (To the left side is an expandable navigation bar assembling the smaller snapshots again.) Clicking on that larger image in turn will lead you to the source site and its article. Articles can be “liked” or send via email, and the site is also available in special mobile versions for iPhone or Android.
The idea of Google Fast Flip is that by preloading lots of static images, article browsing is as fast as flipping through a stack of paper. Google says “One problem with reading news online today is that browsing can be really slow. A media-rich page loads dozens of files and can take as much as 10 seconds to load over broadband, which can be frustrating. What we need instead is a way to flip through articles really fast without unnatural delays”. Google’s single animated ad to the right side is loaded dynamically for every page, and rather quickly. On the downside, text of the images can’t be (Ctrl+F) searched, copied and so on, and enlarging the font is suboptimal. Sometimes, headlines are cut off due to Google’s image cropping. Some obvious features, like address auto-completion when mailing an article when you’re logged in, are missing.
The basic article view...
... and the same with expanded sidebar.
Search result pages are showing the snapshot images, too. Your search query is not highlighted in the images.
All in all it’s an interesting experiment, probably not aimed at anyone doing structural research on any particular news topic, but rather to serve as an alternative type of Google News frontpage... to get a quick idea of what happened around the world (or more specifically, of what the – mostly US based, English – newspapers decided to highlight among all the things happening). The service has its share of accessibility problems, but I still found using the left and right arrows on the keyboard to move sideways through these semi-random articles of a specific category a fun way to discover some news items.
Google’s Fast Flip FAQ mentions that Google’s captures the images from “partners’ websites”, while the frontpage topics “are generated automatically by rising stories in the news.” Which sources does Google decide to include? I’m counting 39 sources linked from the FAQ: BBC News, Billboard, Business Week, Center for Investigative Reporting, Center for Public Integrity, Christian Science Monitor, CosmoGirl, Cosmopolitan, ELLE, Esquire, Fast Company, Foreign Policy, FRONTLINE, Good Housekeeping, Harper’s Bazaar, House Beautiful, Marie Claire, Men’s Journal, National Review Online, New York Times, Newsweek, Popular Mechanics, ProPublica, Quick & Simple, Redbook, Salon, Seventeen, Slate, Smithsonian, SPIN, TechCrunch, Technology Review, Teen, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, The Daily Green, Us Magazine, Veranda, and Washington Post. Google points news publishers to their general news publishers help pages, though there’s no specific entry showing up when doing a search for fast flip. Google tells Times Online that “the majority” of money made from the ads will be given to publishers who signed up with the site. If this type of news reading catches on it turns (already powerful) Google into a proxy – a channel between your browser and the website with the potential for the channel owner to exert additional market control.
[Thanks Jérôme and Dpic!]
Creative Commons Report on "How the Online Population Understands Noncommercial Use"
The Creative Commons organization conducted a survey to find out what people understand to be a "noncommercial" environment, because there's a continued discussion about just which contexts are allowed to use content tagged with a CC Noncommercial license (note the study was conducted with a focus on US users). My understanding as content creator releasing stuff under a CC NC license was always that it's OK to include it in e.g. a blog even if that blog shows some advertisements, but that it would not be OK to e.g. directly sell my CC NC content. In regards to this issue...
... On a scale of 1-100 where 1 is "definitely noncommercial" and 100 is "definitely commercial" creators and users (84.6 and 82.6, respectively) both rate uses in connection with online advertising generally as "commercial." However, more specific use cases revealed that many interpretations are fact-specific. For example, creators and users gave the specific use case "not-for-profit organization uses work on its site, organization makes enough money from ads to cover hosting costs" ratings of 59.2 and 71.7, respectively.
I find the measurement of "covering hosting costs" to be a bit blurry. (For instance, when this blog started out the ads were not covering the hosting costs. Later, they were. Then, the revenues were above the costs. Added confusion comes from the fact that I'm hosting multiple sites on the same server.) But perhaps the key to look at then is whether the site is not-for-profit, or for-profit.
The CC organization continues to wrap up the findings, saying that...
... Finally, both groups rate "personal or private" use as noncommercial, though creators did so less strongly than users (24.3 and 16.0, respectively, on the same scale).
I'm not sure exactly what "personal" use means. Would a personal blog (written by one person) fall in this category, or would it fall outside because the blog is public?
As usual it continues to be safer to not include CC NC content on ad-driven sites, to avoid gray areas. Admittedly, to avoid gray areas it's also always safer to not make "fair use" of copyrighted content, but that would mean voluntarily greatly limiting your rights. It's safer to not include such CC content despite interpretations from e.g. CC founder Lawrence Lessig himself – quote from a post here from last year:
Is it allowed to show e.g. a CC-licensed photo on a webpage which also includes ads to the side if the image uses the "non-commercial" clause? (...)
I've asked the Wikipedia mailing list a while ago, and recently received another confirmation from Creative Commons’ Lawrence Lessig: yes, the CC organization believes this being OK is the best reading of the license. Not that they’re saying you're allowed to directly sell the CC content or anything, but you’re allowed to display ads if you use CC-NC content. But it’s also a matter of how you display ads, Lawrence disclaims, saying that there could be certain advertising schemes that take it too far.
From the perspective of a content creator, to me a CC NC license that would not allow others to include my stuff in their blogs (if the blogs shows some ads) is slightly useless – I want to allow this, I know it may be the #1 use case. And a blog presenting my sketch or so as part of an article would after all not directly make money from that pic, it would just be to spice up the article. For me using just the CC license (without NC) on the other hand would also open up use cases I may not want at the moment... like "Click Here to buy the CD-ROM including all Blogoscoped posts for just $20 via PayPal...". So, right now, I don't really know which license to ideally pick (and creating a mixed license is a bit of a headache).
One thing is worth keeping in mind: beyond the CC license, there's still fair use, which CC does not aim to, and cannot legally, suppress. In other words, your use may be fair – whether (c) or (cc), and even on an ad-driven blog – if certain (gray area!) criteria are met.
[Thanks Mike!]
Monday, September 14, 2009
How to Restrict Google Results to the Past Minutes or Seconds
When you expand the options on a Google search result page, you can restrict the results to things like the past week, the past 24 hours, or “Recent results”. Additionally, by tweaking the URL parameter on the result page, you can restrict to the past minutes... or the past seconds (at least of when Google added it, I suppose, not necessarily when e.g. an article was published).
The parameter value to toggle starts with qdr, which might stand for query date range, as Ran at the Omigli blog writes. Here’s a search for politics with results from the past 45 seconds:
google.com/search?q=politics&output=search&tbs=qdr:s45&tbo=1
And here’s a search for usa restricted to the past 2 minutes:
google.com/search?q=usa&output=search&tbs=qdr:n2&tbo=1
(Note that next to “s" for seconds and “n" for minutes as above, you can also use “h" for hour, “y" for year and more.)
[Thanks Luka!]
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Google is Working to Develop Own Solar Mirror Technology, Reuters Reports
Google is disappointed with the lack of breakthrough investment ideas in the green technology sector but the company is working to develop its own new mirror technology that could reduce the cost of building solar thermal plants by a quarter or more.
“We’ve been looking at very unusual materials for the mirrors both for the reflective surface as well as the substrate that the mirror is mounted on,” the company’s green energy czar Bill Weihl told Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday.
[Thanks George!]
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Amnesty International Targets Shell – on Google Maps
Amnesty International has started a campaign to target Shell on Google Maps*. Amnesty asks people to join them as they turn “Shell stations into ’hell stations’ to publicly highlight the damage Shell is doing in the Niger Delta”. The campaign is focused on the UK, and Amnesty asks people to take “photos that obscure the S of the Shell sign from view” and send those to them. Furthermore, they’re asking to give Shell stations a bad review on Google Maps. “Find any Shell station on Google Maps, and give it a one star review, ensuring that your main message is in the first line of the review”, Amnesty says.
Here’s some of the background Amnesty provided earlier this year on the issue (emphasis by Amnesty):
Fifty years of oil extraction from Niger Delta, Nigeria, has destroyed the environment and the health of the local community.
Oil spills, waste dumping and gas flaring (burning) has poured toxins into the water, soil and air. 2,000 sites have been registered as contaminated and measures to clean up the environment are slow, inadequate or non-existent.
The local community relies on the land and natural waterways for their livelihood and sustenance. Now, they have to drink, cook with and wash in polluted water and eat fish contaminated with toxins. They have lost farming land, and their incomes, from oil spills, and breath air that reeks of oil, gas and other pollutants.
The health consequences of the pollution have been severe.
The Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) is the main operator in Niger Delta, covering 31,000 square kilometres.
Both the government of Nigeria and Shell have a responsibility to clean up oil operations and come clean about the human impact of the oil industry in the Niger Delta.
[Image by Amnesty International.]
*Worth noting that when I try to access Amnesty.org or Amnesty.org.uk here from China, I get the local “connection reset” or “timed out" type of messages (the specific Google Maps map doesn’t fully load either, something seems to hang in-between).
Friday, September 11, 2009
A Look at 5 Years of Google Result Page Changes
Above you can see a Google search result page from 2004, and one from now, 2009. What are some of the design changes?
- The ad box on top changed its background color from blue to yellow. Also, the clickable area in the link got restricted to just the link, and not the full box.
- The logo got smaller. The search box and search button on the other hand got bigger.
- The blue bar changed its color and is brighter now. Google didn’t change it at once, but took an intermediate blue step, perhaps to make the change less noticeable.
- The result width is restricted to a maximum. Previously, on very large screens the page filled the whole width, and ads were positioned on the far right.
- The phrase “Similar pages” has been shortened to just “Similar”.
- The category label, reading “Web”, is using a smaller font.
- Google does not show the file size anymore for every page.
- There’s a “Show options...” link on top. There’s plenty of smaller changes for specific results, too, like the different oneboxes Google added in the meantime, or features like sitelinks, immediate spelling-corrected results and more.
- The text “Sponsored links” at the top of the right hand ad section is left-aligned, not centered.
- The link to the preferences to the right of the search button is gone; you can now access the search settings via the top link.
- The link to the definitions of your search words, shown in the blue bar to the right, is pointing to answers.com instead of dictionary.com.
(Many of the changes not pointed out here are more structural in nature, like indexing speed – which increased a lot –, indexing depth, as well as ranking approaches, which are nevertheless very important factors in how well a search result answers the user query in comparison to other competing engines.)
To a casual user many of these changes may be subtle to the point of being unnoticeable. Web sites often seem to have a natural tendency to change too much for their own good, but the Google result pages have been pretty loyal to their users. Several years ago when I first started using Google, I did so because AltaVista changed around all the time, and often not for the better – the site was suffering from lost focus on search, becoming a typical portal and even showing pop ups. Google may keep this lesson in mind whenever they apply an iterative change to their homepage or results. Still, over time, things do get shuffled around here and there, as the past years show. I wonder what a Google result page will look like in 2014?
Google Displaying Anchor Jump Links in Snippets
Many pages on the web are divided into named sections which can be linked to like #this. Google is now showing direct links to those anchors sometimes. Take a look at the top result for the search query shipping labels ebay seller information; here, in the snippet area the text starts with “Jump to Save on Shipping Costs”, the latter being linked to pages.ebay.com/...labels.html#6.
Previously, Google already started to show jump links for Wikipedia.
[Thanks Russell via email and WebSonic via Search Engine Land!]
A Strange Google Talk Location Status Dialog
This beautiful German dialog of Google Latitude’s Talk Location Status lets you know that your status is currently deactivated, and offers you two choices: deactivate it, or deactivate it.
[Thanks Michael! PS: Careful, the second selection will actually enable the feature, nevermind the label text.]
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