Google May Power MySpace Search

Google and Microsoft are in talks with MySpace to power MySpace's internal search, according to Financial Times.

A senior executive of one of the companies told: "They are looking for a partner and trying to figure it out. They have a good opportunity to increase the revenue on that property."

"Search engines need to encourage more searching [to build revenue] and youth audiences are spending increasing amounts of time on social sites," says Julian Smith, online advertising analyst at Jupiter Research. "So whoever provides the search facility to MySpace will generate a lot of traffic, search results and, ultimately, revenue."

For now, MySpace sends 8.2% of its traffic to Google, according to HitWise.

Office 2007 Beta 2 Review

I installed Microsoft Office 2007 Professional Beta 2 on Windows XP SP2. It was very easy: the setup had about 450 MB and took about 10 minutes to install. After installing, Office had to register, otherwise I could've used it only for 50 times. You can upgrade your existing Office version or you can keep your old Office.

When I opened Microsoft Word, I couldn't believe my eyes. I mean I've seen some screenshots, but what's this? Where is my menu? And why this new toolbar (ribbon) occupies so much space? The ribbon replaces the menu with a list of icons, comboboxes grouped in sections. For example, there is a font section that includes font selection, font size, bold, italic, underline, font color.

The Styles section from the ribbon takes almost half the space of the ribbon and when you hover on one of the styles (heading, normal, title) you preview how the selected text will look if you apply that style. That's all very nice, but I think find and replace is more important than style choosing.

Now instead of trying to find the menu that contains a certain command, you'll try to find the ribbon section that includes it. It's a more visual and a more task-oriented approach. Microsoft dropped menus from most of its products, but it didn't replace them with something as comprehensive as in Microsoft Office.

When you insert a table, you won't see the dialog that asks you how many row and columns would you like to include. Instead you'll choose them using a small rectangle. Office 2007 tries to avoid dialogs and replaces them with contextual menus where possible. Instead of manually selecting margings of the page, Word lets you choose from 6 options (normal, narrow, wide, mirrored, Office 2003 default). If you want to specify the values, you can do that using a classic dialog.

You can even create posts for blogs at Blogger and MSN Spaces, manage multiple accounts and take advantage of the great spell checker and the easiness of inserting tables or equations.



There aren't many new features in Microsoft Office 2007, but the existing ones are better organized, you can preview every setting you make, there are many preformatted elements and less confusing choices to make. Unfortunately, it will take some time to get used to the new interface.

Some more screenshots from Microsoft Office 2007
Review and Visual Tour: Microsoft's 2007 Office Beta 2

Start Menu Replacement

Forget about Start Menu. If you like how Google Desktop lets you open programs from Start Menu, but you don't like its high memory usage, you can try Launchy, a skinnable tool that appears only when you enter a keyboard shortcut (by default, Alt+Space).

You can use it too open all kinds of files from your computer. You can select what kind of files you want to index and their location. Although it won't index the text of the files or their metadata, Launchy is very fast and sexy.

Where to use Launchy?
* launch applications
* start different tools from Control Panel
* open music files
* view pictures

The Brilliant Niniane Wang

... works on a confidential Google project

Google ran a full-page ad in Wired with this text:

"Google is looking for engineers with great aspirations. Take Niniane Wang, for example. A co-inventor of 19 patents in various patents of filing, Niniane skipped three grades, learned the Lisp programming language at 10, and started college math classes at 11. At 18, Niniane graduated with a degree in computer science from Caltech (where she also designed a VLSI chip, built an audio recorder out of chips, and discovered she loved writing software).

We're privileged to have Niniane at Google, but we need more engineers like her - people with passion and ideals and a strong work ethic.

Check out www.google.com/aspireniniane for a list of current openings. If you see something that seems perfect for you, send us your resume, we'd love to hear from you. Cute childhood pictures optional."

Meanwhile, Niniane writes in her blog:

This morning Joby sent out an email to our team:


i realized today during the meeting that...

- if we're working on the best project at google, and
- we're working at the best company on the planet, then

we're working on the Best Project in the World.

Her resume shows that she worked for Microsoft Flight Simulator, movie onebox, Google Desktop Search, Gmail and a confidential project.

But what did she do for this great project?

* Envisioned and chartered a confidential project in the social application space. Spec'ed out vision and got buy-in from execs.

* Led a team of engineers through technical design and implementation of client (C++) and server (Java).

* Convinced artists, PM, UI designer, and engineers around the company to join the team or contribute 20% time.

So the best project still unlaunched at Google is a social network? Maybe a MySpace killer?

Free Password Recovery Software

Last week I found an archive with some important documents on my hard disk, but it was password protected. Unfortunately, I didn't remember the password, so I tried to find a good software to recover the password even if that meant brute-force attack.

Elcomsoft has many programs for password recovery that have many great features and are free for personal (non-commercial) use.

* For ZIP, brute-force attack speed is up to fifteen million passwords per second. The brute force attack is the slowest method of password attack, but can often be successful on short and simple passwords.

* Dictionary-based attack (with word mutations) is available. That's the most effective way to recover a password. English, French, German, Japanese (and many others) dictionaries with hundreds of thousands of words, as well as specialist, technical and foreign language dictionaries are available.

* Fast known-plaintext attack (it takes 10-15 minutes).

* The programs can work in the background, using the CPU only when it is in idle state.

There is no guarantee that the password will be recovered, but most people use short and/or easy to remember passwords. My password had only 6 characters so it was found in less than 2 minutes.

You can recover passwords for archives (ZIP, RAR, ACE), Office documents, instant messangers, files encrypted on NTFS (EFS) partitions. Although they say the free versions are available as 30 days trials, they can be used after this period (with some limitations).

Related:
How to reset Windows password
How to recover data from hard drive

Google's Not Done With Search

Larry Page talked about the future of Google at Google Zeitgeist Europe 2006 conference. Some interesting tidbits:

"People always make the assumption that we're done with search. That's very far from the case. We're probably only 5 per cent of the way there. We want to create the ultimate search engine that can understand anything ... some people could call that artificial intelligence." (From The Independent)

View the Q&A session.

How To Use Gmail Efficiently

Follow this order when composing emails:

* First think if you have to attach files to your email. Select the attachments so they will be already uploaded by the time you finish your mail. If you have many small files to attach or text documents, put all the files in an archive. It's faster and easier to download.

* Then type the text of your email. For compatibility reasons, stay with plain text. Most of the time HTML emails will create problems or will be useless.

* Check the spelling of your text. Gmail has a very cool spell checker with support for 38 languages.

* Then summarize the content of your email and type a meaningful title ("Check this!" or "Hi" aren't good examples of meaningful titles).

* Insert the recipient's email address. If you have more recipients, don't forget to include them in the BCC section.

* Send your mail. This should happen instantly.

Inspired by Google Blogoscoped.

Also see:
5 fast ways to check Gmail

Video AdSense

As reported in February, Google will start to deliver video ads through Google Adsense this week.

"A certain segment of advertisers have told us that they want richer and more engaging messaging capability," said Gokul Rajaram, product management director of Google's AdSense program.

AP says that the ad will show an image that when clicked will start to play a video of up to two minutes.

Hopefully Google will not include the video ads in the same category as image ads to push them to a wide number of publisher that sticked with the default settings. They did this with animated ads, that were animated Gifs.

You can see an example at Google Adwords blog.

Google World Cup Live Results

Google will show live results from FIFA World Cup 2006 in Germany, informs an anonymous blogger.

Google will show information about the matches (when it starts, the teams, who scored) and videos for each goal. The information wasn't confirmed by Google, but it's backed up by some screenshots from Google Translation program.

More: the results are now live.

How Do You Recognize A Google Software?

What sets apart Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, Google Earth, Picasa, Google Talk, Google Deskbar from other software?

Most of the time, a Google software:
* it's free
* it self-updates
* it updates fast
* it has a small installer (maybe except Google Earth)
* it asks you to set Google as default search in Internet Explorer
* it doesn't have a local help
* lately it asks you to sign in to your Google Account to get more options
* it has a search box
* it does one thing (maybe except Google Desktop)
* it's simple to use
* most of the time, you'll find it in beta

If Google Made A Media Player

If Google made a media player, how it would be different?

* The media player would be small and dockable. It would have four buttons: play, pause, stop, shuffle and a search box.

* Google Media Player would find lyrics for your songs using Google search engine.

* It would fill the tags with the artist, the song, the album and the genre of each song.

* Each song would have a mood (like sad, happy, romantic, sleepy).

* Google Media Player's equalizer would adjust according to song's genre.

* You would be able to share your media library, playlists or stats with your Gmail contacts or the whole world.

* Google Media Player would suggest what other songs to listen.

* Google Media Player could play contextual music: let's say you read a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez on your computer. Feed Google Media Player a fragment from the novel and let it find the most appropriate songs from your computer or from online streams.

* Google Media Player would show the latest news from the artist that plays the current song, images from Google Images or what other people think about this song.

* Google Media Player's search functionality would be complex. If you search for "Bjork", you'll also find artists with similar music or artists influenced by her music.

Related:
Google Music Store?
Windows Media Player 11
Google Music Box

Googler's List

Haochi from Googlified has created a list of more than 200 Googlers, with websites for some of them.

Wikipedia has a list of at least 40 Google employees with biographical details.

An easy to digest list of the latest posts from Googler's blogs can be found at Google Blogoscoped.

On one of the best posts you can read there is written by Matt Cutts and gives a couple of corporate rules of thumb like this one:
"It can be difficult to keep a secret on the web. If you are working on some innovative, amazing product that no one has ever seen before, strip your referrers. Also, sanitize any PowerPoint you make available. You probably shouldn’t change how you handle new subdomains or urls either. Remember, if a url is supposed to be private but anyone can access it on the web by visiting the url, someone will stumble across the url; use an .htaccess file to provide password protection on Apache servers. Because if people are interested enough, they will dig through your source code, monitor your robots.txt, and study which domains you buy, even if you buy them through another company. Plan according to how much scrutiny you expect."

Yahoo Mail Beta In IE7

If you use Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 and you are accepted in Yahoo Mail Beta, you noticed that Yahoo blocks every browser that isn't IE 5.5, IE 6.0, Firefox or Netscape. And that includes
Internet Explorer 7, although Yahoo says they support "Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher". If you want to use Yahoo Mail Beta in IE7, there's an easy fix: spoofing the user-agent.

First close Internet Explorer. Copy this text to a file ie6.reg :

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\5.0\User Agent]
"Compatible"=""
"Version"="MSIE 6.0"
"Platform"="Windows NT 5.1"

... and double-click on the file to modify the registry. Now you can use Yahoo Mail Beta and other sites that block any browser they didn't hear about, even if that browser name starts with "Internet Explorer".

Related:
Test IE7 without installing it
Get Yahoo Mail Beta

Play And Convert Any Multimedia File

In this post I will list some problems many people have with multimedia formats and one solution. But let's start with the problems:

* I have a video file and I want to extract the audio part.
* I have an AVI video and I want to put it on my web page in a format optimized for the web.
* How can I transfer videos from my PC to my mobile phone that supports only 3gp format?
* I have an AVI/MOV/ MP4/WMV file and I want to convert it to AVI/MOV/ MP4/WMV.
* How can I save on my disk MMS and RTSP streams?
* Ok, I downloaded a file from YouTube as a flv file, but how can I encode it in a format that can be viewed in any player?
* I got a file in a strange format: 3gp/amr/mp4/ogg/mpc. Does anyone know how can I view it?

There's only one answer to these frustrations and many others: SUPER.

SUPER is a free program that lets you view and convert almost any multimedia format you've ever heard. And you don't have to have any fancy codecs or player, because SUPER includes MPlayer, the best Unix media player, and a lot of codecs, including FFDShow.

Let's see how easy is to save a YouTube video as an AVI file.

Step 1. Go to a video.
Step 2. Select the URL value from the "About this video" box in the right.
Step 3. Paste the value at keepvid.com and save the file as a flv video.
Step 4. Drag and drop the file to SUPER and select the AVI container. Press Encode button.

Although SUPER has a very basic interface, it's very powerful. You just select the format of the output file, drag-and-drop the input file and click Encode. Using the same simple steps, you can convert a MOV file to MP3, an AVI to a 3gp file, an MP3 to a Flash file or any video to a format supported by iPod, PSP or PocketPC. Or you can just play a file in one of these formats.

The package at a glance:
* contains ffmpeg, mencoder, mplayer, ffmpeg2theora
* supported formats: 3gp (Nokia, Siemens, Sony, Ericson) asf, avi (DivX, Xvid, MPEG4, MSmpeg4), fli, flc, flv (used in Flash), mpg (Mpeg I or Mpeg II), mov, mp4, ogg, qt, rm, str (Play Station), swf (Flash), viv, vob, wmv, ac3, amr, mp2, mp3, mp4, ogg, ra, wma
* download size: 25 MB
* freeware

Update. It's pretty hard to find the download links on SUPER's site, so here's a tip: download the software from third-party sites like AfterDawn or Softpedia.

10 Feature Requests For Google Notebook

Dear Google Notebook team,

I used Google Notebook from the first day you launched it and I liked it. I even created notes to help me with my blog posts. But I have some small request for you.

1. export notes as PDF files
2. images should be cached on Google servers (at least as thumbnails if it's a copyright issue, or even as files from Google Image Search cache)
3. gadgets for Personalized Homepage and Google Desktop
4. share a private notebook with your Gmail contacts, or only with some people
5. integrate Google Notebook with Google Calendar, so you can show notes from events
6. upload documents (.doc, .pdf, .xls) and images
7. notes should be searchable from Google Desktop and Gmail
8. a version optimized for mobile phones
9. original text should be differentiated from annotations
10. integrate Notebook with Google Toolbar and kill the Firefox extension and the IE plugin

and another request: sticky notes, notes that should stand out (maybe linked with events from Google Calendar)

I hope I don't ask for too much.

Pearl Jam Video Free Until Next Wednesday

Pearl Jam released its new video from the latest album for the song "Life Wasted" under a Creative Commons license, the same as this blog, and made it available on Google Video. The video can be watched for free until May 24. So enjoy:

You're always saying that there's something wrong...
I'm starting to believe it's your plan all along...

Death came around, forced to hear its song...
And know tomorrow can't be depended on.

I seen the home inside your head,...
All locked doors and unmade beds.
Open sores unattended
Let me say just once that

I have faced it,... A life wasted,...
I'm never going back again.

I escaped it,... A life wasted,...
I'm never going back again.

Having tasted,... A life wasted,...
I'm never going back again.

The world awaits just up the stairs
Leave the pain for someone else.

Nothing back there for you to find,...
Or was it you, you left behind?

You're always saying you're too weak to be strong...
You're harder on yourself than just about anyone.

Why swim the channel just to get this far?
Halfway there, why would you turn around?

Darkness comes in waves,... tell me,why invite it to stay?

You're warm with negativity,
Yes, comfort is an energy,...
But why let the sad song play?

I have faced it,... A life wasted,...
I'm never going back again.

I escaped it,... A life wasted,...
I'm never going back again.

Having tasted,... A life wasted,...
I'm never going back again.

Oh I erased it,... A life wasted,...
I'm never going back again.

How To Break Web Software

Mike Andrews, a software security expert, was invited at Googleplex to talk about web applications security. The video [ 1 hr 26 min 38 sec] is a part of Google Techtalks.

He talks about common security bugs: spoofing, tampering, repudiation, information disclosure, denial of service, escalation of privilege (STRIDE). He also shows how he bought -3 books from an online software and got money on his credit card, instead of paying. Another interesting subject is how to protect against session ID guessing or stealing and page defacement.

Mike gave examples of fixed security bugs from Google applications, including the Gmail cross-site scripting (XSS) bug.

First seen on Geeking with Greg (sorry, Mr. Linden and thank you for Findory).

Google Dreams

How would you dream about Google? Dreamlines is a challenging oneiric journey that lets you explore how dreams are made.

I dreamt about Google and I saw some images related to Google combined in an ambiguous scenery.

"The program generates a personal moving picture, unique, unpredictable, and forever gone when it is finished, just like dreams. But that dream is made out of pieces taken form the subconscious of the whole net, gathered by some words of the user and the obscure logic of searching algorithms."

New Yahoo Homepage In Opera And Safari

The new Yahoo homepage, available at http://www.yahoo.com/preview supports only Internet Explorer and Firefox. Opera and Safari's users can try the new homepage at http://www.yahoo.com/beta.

There are small rendering issues in Opera 8.5, but Opera 9 fully supports the page.

I think webmasters (and especially big companies' webmasters) shouldn't launch a page or a site until every browser can render it. If a browser doesn't support all the Ajax features or CSS 2.0 or other standards, that elements of the web page should degrade gracefully.

Partition Your Hard Drive Without Partition Magic

If you want to resize your partitions, create a new partition to install another operating system without losing your data, you need a powerful disk partitioning utility like Partition Magic. If you don't want to pay for a commercial application, you can use QtParted, an open-source utility that comes with Knoppix.

Ok, but what is Knoppix? Knoppix is a Linux live CD based on Debian distribution. That means you don't have to install it on your system, you just burn it on a CD and boot from the CD.

After Knoppix boots (type knoppix at the boot prompt), start at the large letter K at bottom left. Select K | System | QTParted to launch the utility. The main window is split into left and right panes. The left lists any hard drives that QTParted detects. Click the drive you want to edit, and QTParted will scan it for partition information, displaying the details in the right pane.

You can resize the partitions (choose Resize options), create a new partition. The tool will write the changes to the drive only after you select File | Commit. After QTParted finished repartitioning your hard drive, click on the K menu, and select restart. Remove your Knoppix CD and that's all.

QtParted supports FAT32, NTFS, HFS, ext2, ext3 file systems.

You can download Knoppix from one of these mirrors.

Related:
Burn a Windows Live CD
System Recovery CD
How to reset Windows password

Google Reader Mobile

How do you read news feeds on your mobile phone? If you use Bloglines to manage your favorite feeds, you'll go to Bloglines Mobile. If you use Google Reader, you'll definitely try Google Reader Mobile. There are two ways you can reach Google Reader Mobile:

1. Go to http://www.google.com/reader/m on your mobile phone.

2. From your computer: add Google Reader gadget to your personalized homepage.

From your mobile phone: visit google.com, select the 'Personalized Home' link, then sign in with your username and password.

You can restrict Google Reader to a feed, to a label or you can view the latest feeds. If you click on a post (or type the corresponding digit), you'll read the text from the feed. Any link from the feed will be treated the same as Google Mobile Search does: Google automatically translates (or "transcodes") these pages by analyzing the original HTML code and converting it to a mobile-ready format.

So now you can read this blog on your mobile phone, you just have to
.

Top 20 Google Subdomains

Hitwise created a list of the top 20 Google properties. The most used Google services, other than web search, are Image Search and Gmail. The rest have a pretty low share. It's interesting to see that Froogle is more used than Google Video and that many new services (Google Calendar, Google Finance) don't have a big audience, although they are integrated with Google (Google Calendar is linked in Gmail, Google Finance is the first result for any stock-related search).



In November last year, the first 10 Google services were:
1. Google Web Search: 79.9%
2. Google Image Search: 9.2%
3. Google Mail/Gmail: 5.6%
4. Google News: 1.6%
5. Google Maps: 0.8%
6. Froogle: 0.7%
7. Google Scholar: 0.6%
8. Google Groups/Groups 2 Beta: 0.5%
9. Google Print (Google Books): 0.4%
10. Google Earth: 0.3%

So the Google service with the highest rise is Google Video.

Seven Rules For Google Marketing

Nial Kennedy photographed in February a poster with the 7 principles of Google marketing.

Results must be trackable. [Google has a very complex system for evaluating search results quality.]

Let others speak for you. [Don't boast with your great results. Let your users say they are great.]

Promote trial. [Users should try products in early stages to send feedback and improve them.]

Data. Not hype. [Products should really have added value.]

You're smart. And your time matters. [Don't waste people's time.]

We're serious. Except when we're not. [You don't need a suit to be serious.]

Big ideas move us. [Start with a great idea. The rest will follow.]

Marissa Mayer Profile On Orkut

Marissa Mayer is Google's Vice President for Search Products & User Experience. She has a very nice profile on Orkut, Google's social network. To see it, you need to have an Orkut account and since Orkut is mostly popular in Brazil, here it is:

general
birthday: May 30
here for: friends, activity partners, business networking, dating (men)
children: no
ethnicity: caucasian (white)
languages i speak: English (US)
religion: Christian/Protestant
humor: dry/sarcastic, clever/quick witted
fashion: designer, smart
smoking: no
drinking: socially
pets: i like them at the zoos
living: alone
hometown: Wausau, Wisconsin

interests
passions: Travelling, design, science, math, puzzles, hacking
sports: Volleyball, swimming, softball
activities: Skiing, golfing, running, waterskiing, flying kites,dance (ballet & ballroom)
books: Great Expectations, Atlas Shrugged
music: Madonna, U2
tv shows: Picket Fences, Life Goes On, Friends, West Wing, Nip/Tuck, Project Greenlight, Alias
movies: It's a Wonderful Life, Say Anything, Minority Report, Moulin Rouge
cuisines: French, Italian, Californian, Mexican, Thai, Vietnamese, pretty much anything other than Indian (curry gives me headaches :( )

professional
education: Master's Degree
high school: Wausau West High School, Wisconsin
college/university: Stanford University
major: Symbolic Systems
degree: BS
year:
college/university: Stanford University
major: Computer Science
degree: MS
year:
occupation: Software Engineer/Product Manager
industry: High Tech, Internet
title: Director, Consumer Web Products
job description: Lead product manager for google.com -- overseeing the user experience on the main search engine and the other consumer-facing properties (Images, News, Groups, Froogle, etc.). I manage a small team of associates who do much of the heavy lifting on the day-to-day PM work for the site.
career skills: Product strategy, management/recruiting, UI design, fostering innovation and ideas, coding
career interests: Innovation, design, user interface development, systems engineering

personal
deal match: Intelligent, funny/sarcastic, kind, flexible - willing to try anything once, passionate and excited about the world
height: 173 centimeters
eye color: blue
hair color: blonde
build: athletic
looks: average
best feature: eyes
turn ons: assertiveness, candlelight, dancing, flirting, intelligence, sarcasm, thrills, thunderstorms
turn offs: Smoking, apathy, insensitivity toward others
my idea of a perfect first date: Dinner, a movie, and talking until dawn
from my past relationships i learned: The best relationships grow out of friendship
five things i can't live without: Travel, my family, cashmere, Stuart Weitzman shoes
in my bedroom you will find: Silk pajamas, a down comforter (from La Crosse, WI :) ), high thread count sheets

Related:
Marissa prefers Pine to Gmail
She admits Google Video Store's launch was a failure

Criminal Activities On Orkut

Bloombers reports that Google may face a criminal probe for distribution of child pornography and racist materials by its users through Orkut, the most used social network in Brazil.

The lawyers say that Google failed to comply with a court order to turn over information on where the material comes from. They will try to authorize a police investigation of the Google's Brazilian unit.

"Orkut has become a paradise for pedophiles, who solicit sex with childen and distribute pornographic material", prosecutor Karen Kahn said at a news conference in Sao Paulo.

The attorneys prepare a civil lawsuit against Google's Brazilian unit to demand the company follow the country's Internet laws and pay a daily fine for failing to obey the court order.

Meanwhile, you can find a lot of pornography and extremism on Orkut. And a lot of kids also: more than 1000 kids between 12 and 16 years old.


Child pornography is an issue of great concern to the Brazil Government and Brazil has legislations against it such as the Child and Teenager Statute (Law No 8.069, on 13 th of July 1990), in which its article 241 says: "Take photographs or publish explicit sex scenes or pornographic images involving children or adolescents: – Punishment: 1 to 4 years of reclusion."

Related:
Google sued for promoting child pornography
Bush administration requests data from Google

Vista System Specs

From Microsoft's point of view, PCs will be "Vista-capable" or "Vista Premium Ready". "Vista-capable" computers will be able to run Windows Vista and use it minimally. "Premium Ready" PCs will take advantage of Vista’s Aero graphic engine.

To be Vista-capable, a machine needs at least an 800MHz processor, 512MB of memory and a graphics card that can run DirectX 9. To carry the Premium Ready designation, a PC must have a 1GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, and a graphics card that supports Vista's graphics-driver model.

Today Microsoft will talk about these two labels and how will they be used by retailers to characterize their systems.

More about the system memory and graphics memory necessary for Windows Vista at eweek.com.

To test if your Windows XP is ready for Vista, you can download Vista Upgrade Advisor.

Related:
Windows Vista launch delayed once again
Who can market Windows Vista (or why would you buy Windows Vista)?

Google Desktop Speaks Arabic. I Don't

Look what news I saw today in my english version of Google Desktop. The news about last night's Champions League final between Barcelona and Arsenal was from BBC Arabic and the text of the news was in English. But the title of the news, the description and everything else from the site is in Arabic. I wonder why the English edition of Google News lists the news from BBC Arabic, which are mostly in Arabic.



Related:
Top 10 Google Desktop Gadgets
Identity crisis for Google software

Google Search From Inside

The key to the speed and reliability of Google search is cutting up data into chunks, its top engineer said.

All machines run on a stripped-down Linux kernel. The distribution is Red Hat, but Urs Hoelzle - Google vice president of operations and vice president of engineering - said Google doesn't use much of the distro. Moreover, Google has created its own patches for things that haven't been fixed in the original kernel.

Google replicates the Web pages it caches by splitting them up into pieces it calls "shards." The shards are small enough that several can fit on one machine. And they're replicated on several machines, so that if one breaks, another can serve up the information. The master index is also split up among several servers, and that set also is replicated several times. The engineers call these "chunk servers."

As a search query comes into the system, it hits a Web server, then is split into chunks of service. One set of index servers contains the index; one set of machines contains one full index. To actually answer a query, Google has to use one complete set of servers. Since that set is replicated as a fail-safe, it also increases throughput, because if one set is busy, a new query can be routed to the next set, which drives down search time per box.

In parallel, clusters of document servers contain copies of Web pages that Google has cached. Hoelzle said that the refresh rate is from one to seven days, with an average of two days. That's mostly dependent on the needs of the Web publishers.

"When we have your top 10 results, they get sent to the document servers, which load the 10 result pages into memory," Hoelzle said. "Then you parse through them and find the best snippet that contains all the query words."

From Peeking Into Google, an article written last year at EclipseCon 2005, a conference on the open source.

An interesting video that talks about how Google search works is Google Factory Tour (the video is very long: 5 hr 39 min 41 sec).

Upload Videos To Google Video Faster

Google Video has an easier way to upload videos: using a simple form. Google Video accepts video in AVI, ASF, QuickTime, Windows Media and MPEG formats. The codecs allowed include H.264, H.263, MPEG 1/2/4 and motion JPEG.

The form can be used only for videos under 100MB. The other videos can be uploaded using Video Upload program, like before.

This is a great move from Google. Paul Botin wrote in Slate that "Google has failed to take off for the simple reason that it’s more annoying to use than YouTube. To begin with, you have to install Google’s special uploading application." Now you don't need to install the software. And Google Video doesn't have limitations regarding video duration, like YouTube (10 minutes maximum).

Google Web Toolkit - Ajax Compiler

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a Java software development framework useful for creating Ajax applications.

You can create user interfaces using widgets like button, tree, tab, menubar or textbox, which work in most browsers. You can even create your own widget.

GWT widgets rely on cascading style sheets (CSS) for visual styling.

A simple application that has a button that displays a message when clicked will have a code like this:

package com.google.gwt.sample.hello.client;
import com.google.gwt.core.client.EntryPoint;
import com.google.gwt.user.client.Window;
import com.google.gwt.user.client.ui.Button;
import com.google.gwt.user.client.ui.ClickListener;
import com.google.gwt.user.client.ui.RootPanel;
import com.google.gwt.user.client.ui.Widget;

public class Hello implements EntryPoint {

public void onModuleLoad() {
Button b = new Button("Click me", new ClickListener() {
public void onClick(Widget sender) {
 Window.alert("Hello, AJAX");
}
});

RootPanel.get().add(b);
}

}

The Java code will be translated to JavaScript and HTML and the resulting "Hello World" can be seen here. You will say it's unimpressive, but what about this Desktop Mail Clone or this Dynamic School Schedule? You can find other examples and the source code.

GWT applications can be run in hosted mode (usually during development) within JVM and in web mode, as JavaScript+HTML .

The toolkit is available for Windows (13.9 MB) and Linux (23.9 MB) and includes the GWT compiler, hosted web browser, class libraries, and some demo projects. The GWT Java class libraries are open source and licensed under Apache License 2.0.

GWT was used for Google Maps and Google Calendar.

It's A World Full Of Widgets

Widgets are small aplications that deliver information from the web or from your computer. Many software companies create widget frameworks these days: Yahoo acquired Konfabulator, Google has Google Desktop, Opera will have gadgets in Opera 9, Microsoft will include them in Windows Vista Sidebar, while Apple has an application for Mac OS X 10.4 called Dashboard. Let's see how each company presents its widgets (Google and Microsoft call them gadgets).

The Yahoo! Widget Engine is an application that allows light-weight files called "Widgets" to live directly on a user's desktop and perform a wide variety of tasks, such as checking for wi-fi presence or strength, finding contacts in an address book, viewing a user's calendar, or checking their latest e-mail. Widgets are built on an open platform, which allows any third party developer to build and distribute their own widgets.

Yahoo! - Press Releases

Opera Widgets are small web applications that run directly on a user’s desktop. With Opera Widgets you can quickly write small, focused applications that perform useful tasks. They can interact with online services such as news feeds, dictionaries or search engines. Widgets are self contained Web applications. They may define their own behaviors, and they may offer different levels of interraction. However, widgets will, in general, have a certain level of functionality.

Opera Widgets Developers Documentation

Dashboard is a new world of beautiful accessory applications called widgets that appear instantly to give users immediate access to information like stock quotes, weather forecasts, airline flight tracking, unit of measure, currency conversions and a phone book. With a single click a user's favorite Dashboard widgets instantly appear with up to the second information; with another click they're instantly gone and the user is right back to where they left off. Tiger ships with 14 widgets, and because Dashboard is based on standard web technologies such as HTML and JavaScript, it's easy for third party developers to create new widgets that users can easily add to their Dashboards.

Apple to Ship Mac OS X "Tiger"

Also announced today, Google Desktop 4 beta - available in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, and Brazilian Portuguese - offers another way for users to improve their search experience, by personalizing their desktops with the introduction of Google Gadgets. These gadgets are mini-applications that reside on users' desktops and deliver a variety of personalized information such as games, media players, weather and news. Google Desktop can also recommend new gadgets and can automatically create a personalized homepage for users based on the subjects they frequently search and access.

Google currently has hundreds of gadgets users can add to their desktops and with the new Google Desktop Gadgets API, developers can easily create and share their own gadgets with other users.

Google Press Center: Press Release

Gadgets are a new category of mini-application designed to provide information, useful lookup, or enhance an application or service on your Windows PC or the Web. Examples might include a weather gadget running on your desktop or on your homepage, an RSS Gadget that pulls in your favorite feeds, or an extension of a business application providing just-in-time status on the pulse of your business.

Gadgets for Windows Sidebar will run on your desktop or dock into Windows Sidebar, an upcoming feature in Windows Vista alongside other applications. Desktop Gadgets can developed using Windows Presentation Foundation, DHTML/Atlas, and even ActiveX controls. The beauty of Desktop Gadgets is that they are visually and programmatically rich - scaling from vector-based graphics and managed code to standard techniques you’d use for the Web.

Microsoft Gadgets Blog

Do you like widgets? What do you think is the best product that delivers widgets without consuming all your memory?

Note: You can view this blog post as a Google Notebook.

What's New In Firefox 2

Firefox 2, code named Bon Echo, due to be available in October, will bring many interesting features:

* tabs will have close buttons

* the search box will resize when the windows resizes

* you'll search Google and Yahoo using inline suggestions from the search box

* Bon Echo will allow you to subscribe to feeds using a desktop feed reader (like NewsGator) or a web feed aggregation service (like Bloglines)

* automatic spell-checking for multiline text boxes (useful when you post comments on blogs, it works similar to Microsoft Word's spell-checking)

* session restore (if Firefox crashes, it will ask if you would like to restore your previous session next time you load it)

* when you bookmark a site, you can select a microsummary. Microsummaries are small descriptions for web pages provided by third-party sites, for example instead of seeing "BBC - homepage - Home of the BBC on the Internet", which is the title of bbc.co.uk, you could view the latest news "BBC - US releases 9/11 Pentagon video".

* Safe Browsing will alert if you visit a site that uses phishing or spyware.

* Why Bon Echo? It's the name of a public park located in Ontario, Canada and it means "good echo" - Firefox 2 tries to improve Firefox 1.

Related:
You can test Bon Echo Alpha 3
Reduce memory usage in Firefox
Opera 9 - Discover a new world

Try The New Yahoo Homepage

You've seen screenshots from the new Yahoo homepage. Now you can try it at http://www.yahoo.com/preview. It's cleaner, oriented to search, there are no ads and the space is used wisely.

The new Yahoo homepage gives reasons to sign in: to get a preview of your new mail or to see your contacts. If you don't remember the name of a Yahoo service (in fact there are so many that no one remembers more than five or six), you can click on "All Yahoo Services".

Note: You can try the new homepage only if you use Internet Explorer or Firefox. So Opera users and Safari users won't be able to access Yahoo Mail Beta and Yahoo homepage.

Google Notebook Review

Google Notebook is live. It's a small tool useful if you want to make research on the web - you may want to compare different brands of cars, or gather information for a school project.

It comes as a Firefox extension or as a Internet Explorer plugin. After you install the extension, go to a page, select a fragment from the page that can include images, right-click and choose "Note this". You'll see a very small windows in the bottom-right corner which will stay there even if you go to another page. You can open or close the notebook from the status bar.

If you maximize the notebook, a new tab will open, but the new page will have all your notes in full size. You can edit the notes with a rich-text editor, print the notebook and even create more than one notebook. If you have more than one notebook, you can move a note from one notebook to another using drag and drop, but the experience isn't great (in Firefox, it doesn't work most of the times). Divide a note into sections to organize your notes, especially if you want to print them.

While Google Notebook keeps the general layout of your selection, it doesn't respect the style of the page. For example, if an image has an inline style defined, Google Notebook copies that, but if the page defines its style in an external stylesheet or in the head section, Google Notebook ignores the style.

The rich editor for notes is a small version of Google Page Creator engine, but it doesn't work well, so use it just to change the text or the links, not to adjust the layout. There's no undo or a way to edit the HTML code. If you make something stupid with the note, press Cancel and the note will revert to the previous form.

The selection from Flickr:


The selection rendered by Google Notebook:



You can adjust the spacing if you drag the small indicators you can see in the screenshot above.

By default, a notebook is private. If you want to share it, you can make it public. This way, it will become searchable at this page (for the moment, search is not available).

All in all, Google Notebook is a handy tool that works well for a small list of notes. You can search your notes, but you can't go to a note from the search results so it will be difficult to organize a large set of notes.

A similar solution to Google Notebook is Clipmarks, a service that has additional features: you can tag notes, comment on other people's notes. A note in Clipmarks looks like this.

Related:
Google uses the community to improve search results

Top 10 Google Gadgets

These are my favourite Google gadgets for Google Desktop 4. Some are new, others were available in Google Desktop 3, but most are extremely useful and have a big advantage over standalone applications: you can see their display all the time.

#10.
System Monitor - Shows CPU usage, memory usage, disk activity, network activity.

#9.
Desktop Netstat - Monitor your computer's network connections in realtime. You can view all TCP connections with local address, remote address and owning process for each connection.

#8.
Desktop News - View the latest news from Google News. If you enable Advanced Features in Settings, the news will be tailored to your taste. If you click on many tech news, you'll see more news about science and technology.

#7.
Digg Top Stories - You'll never miss an interesting news from Digg from now on.

#6.
Wireless Signal Meter - A gadget created by Google that shows wireless signal strength.

#5.
LaceLevel2 - Monitors fragmentation level of your local drives. This way you'll know when you need to defragment your hard-drive.

#4.
AdSense Status - View how much have you earned from your Google AdSense account.

#3.
Google Calendar Gadget - You can manage events and see what's going on this month without going to Google Calendar site. The definite Google Calendar plugin.

#2.
gdShredder - Securely shred files/folders using drag and drop, the recycle bin, and free disk space so that the data can never be recovered.

#1.
What's Hot - Tracks popular news and blog posts from Technorati, BlogPulse and other sites.

To add these gadgets, download Google Desktop 4, click on "Add +" button from the top and search for the name of the gadget. Most gadgets can be added instantly.

If You Search For Google On Yahoo

If you search for Google on Yahoo you'll find an interesting search box at the top of the results that suggests you to get real and continue to search on Yahoo. I have a suggestion for Yahoo: what about redirecting the first result (that is google.com) to a page that says: "404: Page Not Found"?

Windows Media Player 11

Nothing new from Windows Media Player 11. The glass design doesn't look good, it's black, it has too many button scattered all around the place. It has an inline search feature that works well for large media libraries, it doesn't lists artists and songs in trees - the new media player uses a similar approach to Windows Explorer.

But there are people that say Windows Media Player 11 has many new features. Let's see:

"Some of the unique features of Media Player 11 are a deeply integrated music library for both online and offline content, a new and improved interface, the ability to connect to additional hardware easily, and integrated, easy-to-use tools for following the process of any task (downloading music, burning CDs, synching music, or streaming video, just to name a few). Media Player 11 has a new integrated feel, too — one that makes online, network, and offline content indistinguishable. Many of the improvements are due to the redesigned interface, which includes simplified trees, helpful shortcuts on the menus and menu bars, and an advanced and improved media library. There are now Back and Forward buttons, giving Media Player a web-browser feel; a lightning-fast WordWheel search tool for getting through the library; and Xbox 360 support."

You can download WMP 11 from Softpedia (Windows 2000/ XP - download size: 22MB).

Add Gadgets To Google Pages

You can add modules/gadgets (like those on your personalized Google homepage) to a page in Google Pages.

1. Go to Site settings and enable experimental features. (Accept the "not for the faint of heart" feature.)

2. Go to a page, click on a editable area and click on "more" (the new button from the left toolbar).

3. You'll see a dialog that lets you add a gadget. You can view latest news, local weather or play PacMan right from your page.



Related:
Google Pages review
Google Desktop 4.0 with gadgets

Do You Trust Google?

Google Blogoscoped quotes a German podcast that asks "why do we trust Google more than Microsoft?". I found some diggers' comments more interesting than the podcast, so I will quote two great opinions:

YES, I TRUST GOOGLE

"People who think Google does anything with your e-mail that other webmail services don't do are the ones who don't have the facts. Gmail basically scans your e-mail for keywords so it knows what ads to fetch. The mechanics of it aren't really any different from a spam filter or spell checker, and the likelihood of abuse is absolutely no different. In fact, this wouldn't even be the most efficient way to abuse your privacy. If they wanted to do something nasty with your e-mails, it would be done behind the scenes without necessarily having any connection with an ad system or anything else. And in that respect, any public webmail system on the planet could be doing whatever they want with your e-mails and you would have no way of knowing. Yes, you have to trust that Google isn't abusing your rights, but it's no different than any other public webmail service.

The same argument goes for tracking browsing behavior. Anyone could be doing it (and in fact, I'd be willing to bet that every major search engine does) whether they use cookies or not. To an extent, I can track people visiting my website, seeing them move from page to page across multiple visits, without the use of cookies (although a cookie would help improve the tracking accuracy). Google's cookie is no different from any other search engine's preferences cookie, except they happened to be the first major search engine to use such a distant expiration date. The expiration date is basically the date at which your browser should automatically clear your cookie. If you want the cookie to expire right now, just clear your cookies manually.

Again, those who think Google is doing anything more privacy-invading than other search engines or webmail services are the ones who don't seem to have the facts here. From a technical point of view, all such services have as much ability to follow your behavior and report it to the government."

NO, I DON'T TRUST GOOGLE

"I don't trust Google. The amount of tracking they do on everyone is worrying. It's not Google per se that worries me, as they have a pretty decent track record, but it's who will get access to this information in the end. What if Google is bought by another company some time in the future? Or if laws are passed that allow various governments access to our data?

Google knows pretty much everything about us, from our search queries, our surfing habits tracked by Google ads, they know where we live and where we go by our Google Maps queries and if you have a GMail account, they know a lot more about you personally. It's a gold mine."

Yahoo To Microsoft: You Have No Chance In Search

Terry Semel, Yahoo's CEO, turned down Microsoft's offer to buy a part of Yahoo Search division, reports Financial Times.

"[We discussed] search, and Microsoft co-owning some of our search. I will not sell a piece of search – it is like selling your right arm while keeping your left; it does not make any sense."

"My impartial advice to Microsoft is that you have no chance. The search business has been formed."

"I do not expect [web] search to decline but it may not be the way you do it two or three years later," he said. "Is web search the killer application or just the first? Knowledge search, as they call it in Korea, or social search, as we call it, has blown through the roof. There may be changing dynamics."

What have we learnt? Microsoft has to improve its search engine by itself. Or else, it won't be the default search engine in IE7 for too long. Even if the Department of Justice agrees.

More from Search Engine War:
Terry Semel wish he had bought Google in 2001
Microsoft found how to win Google battle
Google vs. Microsoft: I want to be the default search engine in IE7

Nokia 770 Will Include GTalk

Nokia 770 Internet Table which offers Wi-Fi access and high-resolution touch screen will include Google Talk as a VoIP application.

Engadget found out that Nokia will launch this model Tuesday and it will cost around $390.

The Nokia 770 Internet Tablet's software is upgradeable and currently runs on the Linux-based Internet Tablet 2005. It includes Opera browser, internet radio, PDF viewer and media player.

The upgrade to the Internet Tablet 2006 operating system will include support for additional services, like VoIP and Instant Messaging.

Related:
Google Talk Tips

Yahoo Could've Bought Google In 2001

Terry Semel, Yahoo's CEO feels sad about something that didn't happen in 2001. Semel met with Larry Page and Sergey Brin and talked about the possibility of acquiring Google. Google's founders said that Google was worth $1 billion, but it's not for sale. After a week, Google's price was $3 billion. Terry Semel didn't understand why Google had a such a big price, since their revenue was almost non-existent.

"And I said, well you still have the same business you had two weeks ago, right? Which adds up to nothing. So obviously we couldn't and didn't buy the company."

Well, that's lack of vision. Google had a lot of problems convincing investors that a search engine is a good place to put your money. Andy Bechtolsheim, one of Sun's founders was the first to invest $100,000 in Google.

Gmail Avatars

After introducing in Google Talk the option to select a picture to represent your identity, Google extends the avatar to Gmail.


The picture shows up when you roll over a name in your inbox, Contacts, or Quick Contacts list. You can show your picture to everyone or only to your friends (the people that can see when you're online in Google Talk or Google Chat). A very cool feature is that you can suggest a photo for a contact.


Google tries to build a strong community of users. Everything started with Google Talk, and now continues with Google Co-op, Google Notebook - both social tagging tools. Using some gadgets from Google Desktop, you can play games with your friends and even send files. This will become standard features for Google Talk.

So expect more social products from Google.

P.S.: the feature will roll out in the next days, so don't be surprised if you don't see it.

10 Great Questions For Google

Q: Why not use clustering technology to help searchers refine queries?
A: Marissa: Google Co-op comes at this from a different direction by using labels from authoritative sources.
Jonathan: You might think that this iteration would be helpful, but if the page already has relevant results, sometimes it slows the user down.

Q: Is Google a portal?
A: Marissa: Originally portal meant doorway, and Google is the first place to start for a lot of people. The definition changed in 1999. Our layout and experience are really different though. There’s a lot of potential headroom left in search.
Jonathan: It's still room to interpret queries better, still room to personalize. And lots of ways to make the ads more relevant.

Q: What about competition with Microsoft?
A: Jonathan: We’re going to continue to focus on innovating as fast as we can.

Q: Microsoft is spending more on machines. Will that cause Google to spend more?
A: Historically, we have always been aggressive in investing in our business and R&D. I don’t expect us to stop, but we won’t be wasteful.

Q: Do you have a goal to create a larger API for all applications on the web? And a way to monetize that?
A: Sergey: No, but it could happen. No uber-API goal right now.
Eric: We’ll do what makes sense based on what users need.

Q: Do you think "Do no evil" can resist being a business?
A: Sergey: In short, yes. We’ve done a good job on aligning our business goals with the goals of our users and doing the best we can. In general, we’re doing a very good job on staying true to out mission. But there will always be some people who disagree about some decisions that we make.

Q: Google has a large database. You say "we’re not evil" and won't abuse data. How can you guarantee you’re not evil?
A: Larry: We rely on the trust of our uses, and if we did something bad as defined by our users, it would severely hurt us. The good news is that large companies that have a good brand are aligned with users' interests: they have a large disincentive that keeps Google trying to do the right thing for users. I would worry more about companies that don't have a user brand but are gathering a ton of info.

Q: Are you interested in bidding on wireless? How many data centers and complaints from webmasters?
A: We look to partner in wireless. We’re looking at the feedback. Sergey: Overall, this new search index is a definite win, in our opinion. Queries that webmasters may be doing are not as typical as normal users' queries, but we have a team looking at the feedback now.

Q: Tradeoff between free-and-not-perfect and a product with great quality?
A: Sergey: We think of them as great already even though they’re not perfect. "We probably abuse the word beta a little bit." Labs is supposed to be the place where things can fall down. People expect a lot more from Google these days, so we could communicate more about which are in the beginning stages and which are more mature. Elliot: conception of Labs is a great example. We wanted to be able to throw stuff up, but people expect more from Google. PR will try to communicate more clearly about expectations.

Q: Why did you cash in a huge pile of shares last year? Do you wish for the days when you were smaller? No China or government conflicts, no inviting press?

A:

Eric: We are delighted to have you here. Execs around IPO time were required to enter into 10b5 plans as part of best practices.

Sergey: I’m happy holding 80% of my stock all in one company. The vast majority I intend to keep forever."

Larry: I remember when we were 100 people, my argument was that search was too important and too meaningful and too global to the world for a small company to really succeed. We really do believe that we’re accomplishing a lot and making the world a better place, and you have to be larger to do that.

More questions from Google Press Day 2006 at Matt Cutts Blog.

Google Notebook Screenshots

Erica, a Google employee, made some screenshots for Google Notebook, a product that will be launched next week:





Google Notebook seems similar with Google Bookmarks and has a lot from Gmail's design.

Update: Google Notebook is live. You can read my review.

Google Trends Competition

Using Google Trends, you can compare the evolution of the popularity of different products or brands:

Yahoo Mail vs Gmail vs Hotmail -> Winner: Hotmail, second place: Gmail

XBox vs PSP -> Winner: XBox

YouTube vs Google Video -> Winner: Google Video (but YouTube has a very fast rise)

Winamp, Real Player, Windows Media Player, iTunes -> Winner: Winamp, second place: WMP

Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer, Safari -> Winner: Fiefox, second place: Opera

Digg vs Slashdot -> Winner: Slashdot (Digg has a good evolution and the two news sites are almost equal)

RSS vs Atom -> Winner: RSS

Apple, Linux, Windows -> Winner: Windows, followed by Linux

Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer -> Winner: Bill Gates (by far)

Wikipedia vs Britannica -> Winner: Wikipedia

Google Gapminder - Visualize World Development

Using Gapminder, you can visualize World Development Indicators from The World Bank. You will see a scatterplot where each bubble represents a country. The position of the bubble is determined by the indicators on the axes. The size of the bubble represents the population of the country.

The indicators include: carbon dioxide emissions, child mortality, economic growth, internet users per 1000 people, military budget, phone users per 1000 people, urban population. You can find information about Bangladesh fertility, for example.

The software was created by Gapminder, a Swedish foundation that develops information technology for provision of free statistics in new visual and animated ways. Google hosts the software on its servers.

You can also view a video of a Google TechTalk abour Gapminder.

Google Uses Community To Improve Search Results

At Google Press Day, Marissa Mayer launched four products:

* two are available online: Google Trends, Google Desktop 4.0

* two will be available soon:

- Google Notebook will be a little window similar to Gmail Chat window where you can drag-and-drop content from sites. It's like the "Blog This!" button on Google Toolbar, but you don't store the content on your blog - you store it on your Google Account. Google Notebook will be available next week at http://google.com/notebook.

Google Notebook is a simple way for users to save and organize their thoughts when conducting research online. This personal browser tool permits users to clip text, images, and links from the pages they're browsing, save them to an online "notebook" that is accessible from any computer, and share them with others.

Google Notebook is an interactive scratch pad for every website a user visits, offering a single online location to collect web findings without having to leave the browser window. For example, if a user were planning a vacation, she could clip the most relevant materials on the pages she visits and add personal notes to help organize all of her research.

Users can make their Google Notebook public and share the notes they've taken with others. As a result, the time and effort put into their research can be harnessed by the online community as a whole.

- Google Cooperation lets you associate tags with web pages.

Google Co-op beta is a community where users can contribute their knowledge and expertise to improve Google search for everyone. Organizations, businesses, or individuals can label web pages relevant to their areas of expertise or create specialized links to which users can subscribe.

Once a user has subscribed to a provider's content, all of that provider's labels and subscribed links are added to the user's search results for relevant queries. These contributions serve as meta information that helps Google's search algorithms connect users to the most relevant information for their specific query.

For example, a doctor can label web pages related to arthritis, and users who subscribe to that doctor's information will receive options at the top of the results for more specific information such as "treatment," "symptoms," or "for health professionals" when they enter a relevant query.

Related:
You can see a screenshot for Google Cooperation that explores the medical vertical (hyped as Google Health)
Google Notebook review

Google Trends

Google Trends is a new product that lets you see how many searches have been done for the terms you enter. Imagine Google Zeitgeist for any search query. You can find the countries and regions where a search is popular.

You can see the trends for [google browser] query:

You can even compare up to five terms by separating each term with a comma.

Google Desktop Gadgets

Google released a new version for Google Desktop (Google Desktop 4.0 Beta) that includes many interesting new features and has a slicker look.

Google Desktop can finally automatically remove deleted files from the index. You can add modules from Personalized Homepage to the desktop.

Plugins are now called gadgets and have a new development model - they are interactive XML mini-applications. Google Desktop will recommend new gadgets and can also automatically create a personalized Google homepage.

The gadgets are extremely well made: you'll find a media player with visualization effects*, Digg's top stories, del.icio.us bookmarks, a network monitoring tool (Desktop Netstat), a gadget that shuts down your computer on schedule, a disk fragmentation monitor, a tool for shredding files, a wireless signal meter and a weather 3D globe. Some gadgets (like ToDo list) can save the data on Google servers so you can access it from any computer.

Unfortunately, the RAM usage will be high if you choose too many gadgets.

* In case you were wondering about the Google Media Player, it's just a small skin for Windows Media Player integrated with Google Desktop. Try this: play a song with Google Media Player and then open Windows Media Player. You'll see the same song playing.

Google Search Continues To Improve

Some interesting things about search from Alan Eustace's speech at Google Press Day.

• 10-20% of the web changes every month
• thousands of machines are involved in processing a single query
• Google uses more than 200 signals for PageRank
• Google has an index 3 times as large as Yahoo's index or MSN's index
• 20-25% of the queries are unique
  

Google Purchases Ready To Launch?

"Tom: Any word on how the survivors in the town are doing, Mitch?
Mitch: W-we're not sure what exactly is going on inside the town of Beaverton, uh Tom, but we're reporting that there's looting, raping, and yes, even acts of cannibalism.
Tom: My God, you've, you've actually seen people looting, raping and eating each other?
Mitch: No, no, we haven't actually seen it Tom, we're just reporting it."
South Park, "TWO DAYS BEFORE THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW"

Dirson reports that Google is making some tests on Google Purchases (purchases.google.com), the site that is supposed to launch soon and that will allow you to buy things with your Google Account id. If you go to the site, you'll get a prompt for your username and password and you'll be redirected to Google Accounts.

Somehow related to Google Purchases:
GBuy - Google to compete with PayPal
eBay creates anti-Google union with Yahoo and Microsoft

Google's Executives Sell Stocks. A Lot

San Francisco Chronicle found out that Google's executives sold a lot of stocks:

California took in a record $11.3 billion in personal income tax receipts in April, $4.3 billion more than it collected last April. It's almost certain that a significant chunk of April's haul came from Google employees -- perhaps one-eighth or more of the tax receipt gain.

Fourteen of Google's top executives and directors sold $4.4 billion worth of stock last year, according to Thomson Financial. That includes founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, each of whom sold about $1.3 billion worth of stock.

In 2005, officers, directors and other insiders at the largest 200 publicly held companies in the Bay Area sold a total of $9.6 billion in stock, up from $7 billion in 2004, according to Thomson Financial. Google alone accounted for almost half of the 2005 total.

Rondam Ramblings, an ex-Google employee, made an interesting point some time ago about Google stocks:

"Nonetheless, it has always been a bit of a mystery to me why anyone bought Google's stock, let alone paid $470 a share for it not so long ago. [...] Google has explicitly stated that it will never pay dividends. They have explicitly said that they will offer no guidance to investors. Their stock structure is such that even if you bought every single publicly traded share of Google stock, Larry and Sergey would still control the company because their privately held stock has ten times as many votes as your publicly traded shares. So there is no hope that your shares will ever be of value to someone attempting a hostile takeover of Google."

Is this a sign that GOOG's value is inflated and that will soon fall?

Google Press Day

Marissa Mayer told USA Today that Google will make some important announcements today, at the annual Google Press Day. You can view the webcast at Google's site starting with 9:30 AM Pacific Time.

Agenda:

9:30 am Welcome Elliot Schrage

9:40 am How We’re Doing and Where We’re Going Eric Schmidt

10:10 am A Search Technology Overview Alan Eustace

10:30 am Be Global, Act Local Omid Kordestani

11:00 am Break

11:25 am Innovation: Many Shapes, Many Sizes Jonathan Rosenberg Marissa Mayer

12:15 pm Executive Q&A

1:00 pm Lunch

You can see the webcast.