Google Shows Additional Information for Forums

After displaying the published date for search results, Google experiments with showing more information about forum threads. Below the title, there's a new line with the following format:

Discussion forum: number of posts - number of authors - date of the first post


The extended snippet categorizes the search result and indicates its potential usefulness: for example, a thread that has a single post or a single author is not very useful.

Other search results that include special metadata:

* videos show a thumbnail, the duration and sometimes the average rating (on a related note, Google no longer lets you play videos inline)


* Google Books results show the author, the published date, an important category and the number of pages

Google slowly categorizes the documents from its index and starts to show additional information relevant for each category. We can expect to see extended snippets for blogs, news sites, shopping sites, scholar papers and even a way to restrict the results to a certain category. An experiment from last year grouped the search results in different categories: references, reviews, stores etc.

For now, the extended snippet for discussion boards is not live for everyone, but you can change your Google cookie to be a part of the experiment.

The Importance of Being Included in Google's Index

Last Friday, Google Analytics reported a surprisingly small number of visitors for this blog. According to Search Engine Roundtable, Google removed from the search results all the blogs hosted at blogspot.com and some of the .info domains for about 8 hours. It probably was an accident or a web spam filter that learns from my posts.


Many sites receives most of the traffic from search engines (especially from Google). Ryan Stewart's blog has been delisted from Google and he describes the consequences.

Yesterday was one of the scariest days I've had in a long time and it put in total perspective the power that Google wields. (...) I was working on a blog post and was searching for something I'd written before so that I could reference it. Instead of using my blog's search, I of course used Google's site feature, like I always do. Only this time, I got nothing. (...) I was confused, angry, and I felt completely helpless. Everyone uses Google. It was a big referrer to my blog and when I posted tips and tricks for Flash/Flex/AIR I did so knowing that someone could Google the problem and find my blog.

In his case, it wasn't Google's fault. "It turns out that Ryan's blog had been hacked, and Google does remove hacked sites from our index to protect our users," explains Matt Cutts. But whether a site is removed from Google's index accidentally or on purpose, it's interesting to quantify the importance of a popular search engine like Google for both users and publishers.

Google Anti-Malware Diagnostic Pages

ZDNet's security blog points to an update to Google's malware warnings. Like McAfee SiteAdvisor, now each web site has a special diagnostic page that lists answers to four questions:

1. What is the current listing status?
2. What happened when Google visited this site?
3. Has this site acted as an intermediary resulting in further distribution of malware?
4. Has this site hosted malware?

Here's, for example, the diagnostic page for google.com: http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=google.com, which lists some interesting facts.

"Of the 274621 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 4 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 05/22/2008, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 03/13/2008. Malicious software includes 4 scripting exploit(s), 4 trojan(s). Successful infection resulted in an average of 10 new processes on the target machine. Malicious software is hosted on 4 domain(s), including 58.65.239.0, truemaybe.com, abc-powers.com. 5 domain(s) appear to be functioning as intermediaries for distributing malware to visitors of this site, including xtraff.biz, x-traffic.ws, smartvideochannel.com."

Despite all of these findings, google.com is not listed as suspicious, probably because the domain is whitelisted or the suspicious content is not very significant. It's likely that the domains listed above are from Google's search results, so that means the anti-malware system doesn't respect robots.txt.

Google Sites Available Without Google Apps

As promised when the service was launched as part of Google Apps, now you can use Google Sites without having a domain. "A few months ago we launched Google Sites exclusively as part of Google Apps for companies and organizations that wanted to use the service on their own domains. Now we've made it easy for anyone to set up a website to share all types of information -- team projects, company intranets, community groups, classrooms, clubs, family updates, you name it -- in one place, for a few people, a group or the world," says Andrew Zaeske on the Google Blog.


The sites are available at: http://sites.google.com/site/SITENAME and there doesn't seem to be a limit for the number of sites you can create. You can create as many web pages as you like, but each site has a storage quota of only 100 MB.

By default, each site is public, but you can make it private in the settings or when you create it. The same as in Google Docs, you're able to invite people as collaborators or viewers, but a site can have more than one owner.

Google Sites offers the same basic customization options like Blogger (themes, layout editor) and a rich text editor similar to the one from Google Docs, except that you can also embed a small number of whitelisted objects (Google Docs documents, spreadsheets, gadgets, YouTube videos).

In addition to web pages, you can also create simple blogs, lists, file cabinets and iGoogle-like dashboards. Each page can be arranged in a hierarchy and has a revision history that allows you to revert to earlier versions of a page. Google automatically creates a sitemap and can notify you when someone makes changes to the site or to an individual page.

For now, Google Sites looks pretty basic and doesn't include all the powerful features from JotSpot, the service acquired by Google and transformed into Google Sites. But that shouldn't be surprising, if you take into account that all Google services started small and gradually became more powerful and useful. I think the future of Google Sites is to combine Google's collaborative services so you can share more documents in a single page or to create blogs the same way you create calendars, to-do lists and photo galleries.

Future Updates for Google Image Search

At the recent "Search Factory Tour" event (slides, YouTube video), Google announced that its image search engine has received a lot of attention from users lately and it intends to dramatically improve it. People no longer use Google Image Search only to find celebrity pictures or pretty images, they started to use it to compare products, to choose vacations or visualize unfamiliar situations.


To cope with the increasing number of images from the web and to provide better answers for the new use cases, Google promised that will start to add features that use complex image analysis.


One of the new features will allow you to find similar images, given a selected image. Since it's difficult to describe pictures using words, you will be able find a a group of images that illustrate the same situation.

After adding face detection as a restriction for image search, Google prepares to expand it and actually recognize faces. This will improve the quality of results for searches that include person names. Google doesn't intend to limit image recognition to people faces: finding objects in pictures is a difficult task, but it's a reliable way to filter irrelevant pictures.

Image search engines don't use the information from EXIF tags, that could offer a lot of interesting contextual details about location, date, image quality. Google will start to add information about geolocation from digital images.


The most controversial new feature tested by Google is the addition of display ads next to image results for commercial queries. Google's previous experiments with text ads weren't very successful, so adapting the ad format to the content could be a better idea. It depends on their usefulness and their prominence: the second mock-up displayed above puts too much emphasis on the image ads. For now, Ask.com Image Search is the only important search engine for images that displays ads, but they're text-only.

If we take into account that, in addition to all these enhancements, Google developed an improved algorithm for ranking images (VisualRank), we can expect an entirely new image search engine from Google in the near future.

Google News Layer for Google Earth

There's a new layer for Google Earth that shows Google News stories related to a location. At the recent "Factory Tour of Search" event, Google explained the difficulties of automatically identifying the locations of a news story. For example, just because a news article includes "Paris" doesn't mean that the article talks about France's capital. It could be about the Texas city or Paris Hilton, so the algorithm needs to disambiguate names, identify complete addresses and determine the importance of an alleged location in a text. Google News also uses its automatically-generated clusters to validate locations and their importance to a news story.

"The launch of Google News on Google Earth is a milestone in the evolution of the geobrowser. By spatially locating the Google News' constantly updating index of stories from more than 4,500 news sources, Google Earth now shows an ever-changing world of human activity as chronicled by reporters worldwide. Zoom into areas of personal interest and peruse headlines of national, regional and, when fully zoomed in, even the most local of interest," says Brandon Badger, Product Manager of Google's Geo team.

To enable the Google Earth layer, go to the Layers sidebar, expand "Gallery" and select "Google News" from the impressive list of overlays. Another news-related layer that has been recently added to Google Earth is for New York Times, but it's likely that the news are geo-coded manually.


If you want to read news related to a location in your browser, add a local section to the personalized Google News homepage. "Adding a Local News section allows you to track news stories from and about a particular city or region. While this function is currently only available in our English language editions, we hope to add more languages and regions in the near future," explains the Google News help center.

Set Basic HTML as Default Gmail View

If you use Gmail and you'd like a simplified interface that doesn't use AJAX, loads fast and works well in most browsers, try the basic HTML view. Gmail links to this version at the bottom of the page, but you can also access it if you go to http://mail.google.com/mail/h/.

Until recently, Gmail didn't have the option to set the basic HTML version as the default interface and you had to bookmark its URL or click on the link from Gmail's footer. Now there's an option to always go to the HTML version, every time you load Gmail.

Please keep in mind that the simplified version lacks many useful features:
* integration with Google Docs and Google Calendar
* keyboard shortcuts
* integrated chat
* composing options: spell checker, rich formatting, address auto-complete, custom From address
* ads (useful feature?), related pages, tracking packages and addresses
* contact management
* web clips.

Google recommends to use the basic HTML view for slow Internet connections, although you may find it useful when you use exotic browsers or when the standard version doesn't work. If you change your mind and you want to go back to the AJAX version, click on "Standard View". Apparently, the standard view loads much faster thanks to some aggressive optimization.

Google Health Launches

After a year and a half since the first announcement, the much-anticipated Google Health has been released at Google Factory Tour of Search. "Patients need to be able to better coordinate and manage their own health information. We believe that patients should control and own their own health information, and should be able to do so easily," said Adam Bosworth in November 2006.


Here's what you can do in Google Health:
* create a health profile with information about your health conditions, medications, allergies
* import medical records from US hospitals that use Google's APIs to make the conversion possible. Unfortunately, the list of partners is almost empty.
* read medical resources, information about diseases


* find a doctor using Google Local Search
* use other health services that integrate with Google Health and can can import your data securely and use it for different purposes: calculate the heart attack risk, print your health history or share it with doctors. According to the FAQ, "Google Health is a PHR (Personal Health Record), but it is also a bit of a different model. We believe it's not enough to offer a place where you can store, manage, and share your health information. You need to act on your health information to better manage your health needs on a daily basis. This is why we provide a directory of online health services to you. You must elect to sign up with a service and decide what level of personal data you want to share in exchange for the customized services those companies offer."

Google Health wants to become the central place where you organize your health information and share it with people or services you trust. Since this information is very sensitive, Google takes a lot of precautions by using SSL connections and a separate privacy policy that clearly states: "You control who can access your personal health information. By default, you are the only user who can view and edit your information. If you choose to, you can share your information with others."

This is a big test of trust for Google and probably the most personal service ever offered by the company. While you can also enter your credit card information in Google Checkout, your location in iGoogle or Google Maps, personal information in orkut, Blogger and YouTube, Google Health is about your existence.

"Health information is very fragmented today, and we think we can help. Google believes the Internet can help users get access to their health information and help people make more empowered and informed health decisions. People already come to Google to search for health information, so we are a natural starting point," says Google. But there's a big difference between offering general health information and storing health records, so it will be interesting to see if Google manages to convince users that this shift is beneficial to them. Google could integrate more health information in the search results, the same way Microsoft shows information from HealthVault in Live Search and lets you collect it in your account. TechCrunch says that "Google promises never to advertise on Google Health".

(Small tidbits: Google Health is one of the very few Google applications created using Google Web Toolkit and its codename seems to be Weaver.)

Share and Annotate Web Pages in Google Reader

Google Reader's sharing feature was barely noticed when it was added, then it got more exposure when the shared items started to be broadcasted to Google Talk contacts and some sites aggregated shared posts. As Google Reader became more social, people discovered that it has some important limitations. "Have you ever wanted to share something that you were reading, but you didn't want to go through the hassle of subscribing to a whole feed for a single interesting article? And what about sharing content from sites with no feeds?, " asks Google Reader Blog.

Google Reader finally added an option to share any web page and to add notes for each shared item. Next to each post, there's a new action: share with note that can be used to explain why you found the post interesting or to add your comments. You can also go to the new Notes section to add a note or drag a bookmarklet to your browser's link bar so you can share any web pages, even if it doesn't have feeds.

Another improvement is that Google Reader shows small avatars next to each shared item and you can customize your public page by selecting a theme. But don't get to excited as the three themes that are available (ice cream, ninjas, sea) fail to impress and look terrible in Internet Explorer 7.




The new features are useful, but Google Reader didn't find a way to integrate discussions in the annotating feature, so you can reply to a comment. Even if it's not a feed reader, FriendFeed is a better place for sharing web pages and discussing them with the people you know or care about.

{ Thank you, Josh, Myo, Pascal. }

Later notes:
* you can't delete or edit notes
* there's no keyboard shortcut for "sharing with notes" the shortcut for "sharing with notes" is Shift-D because D is next to S on the keyboard and Shift-S is the shortcut for sharing
* when you share a post, Google Reader displays the full content of the post in an editable box. That means you can modify a post before sharing it. And that's not all: Google Reader shows the HTML code when you click on the editable box
* there's an overlap between this feature and services like Google Notebook or Google Shared Stuff.

Google Translate Becomes the Best Free Online Translator

Google Translate's coverage has been expanded dramatically. It now supports the translation between any of the following languages: English, Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish (the new languages are shown in bold). From 26 language pairs, Google Translate now supports 506 language pairs and becomes the most comprehensive online translation tool available for free.

Obviously, the translation is far from being perfect or even coherent, but it's a great way to understand the central ideas from a text. Now that Google Translate supports so many languages, it's not hard to imagine that you'll be able to read almost any web page in your language and maybe any application will be able to use Google Translate's APIs to speak your language.

"Most state-of-the-art, commercial machine-translation systems in use today have been developed using a rule-based approach, and require a lot of work to define vocabularies and grammars. Our system takes a different approach: we feed the computer billions of words of text, both monolingual text in the target language, and aligned text consisting of examples of human translations between the languages. We then apply statistical learning techniques to build a translation model. (...) Automatic translation is very difficult, as the meaning of words depends on the context in which they're used. While we are working on the problem, it may be some time before anyone can offer a quick and seamless translation experience," explains Google Translate's FAQ.

YouTube Shows Stats for Your Videos

Now you can find some basic statistical data about the videos you've uploaded to YouTube. For each of your videos, you can view a chart that shows the number of daily views and the evolution of your videos' popularity. The stats can be restricted to a continent or to a country and you can also see the countries where your videos are more popular.

"How does this help you? Well, using these metrics, you can increase your videos' view counts and improve your popularity on the site. For instance, you might learn that your videos are most popular on Wednesdays, that you have a huge following in Spain, or that new videos that play off previous content become more popular more quickly," suggests YouTube's blog.

The analytics data is really basic and doesn't include a lot of interesting information like the sites that embed your videos, the most important sources of traffic, how many people view the full video or play it again etc.


To find your video stats, go to your YouTube account and click on "About this video".

Google to Add Language Translation in Gmail

ComputerWorld reports that Google intends to integrate its language translation service in Gmail and Google Talk. There are already bots that could facilitate an IM conversation with a person that speaks a language you don't know, but it would be much better to have the feature built in. Even if the translation is far from perfect and often incoherent, you'll understand the main ideas.

"What you need for real-time automated machine translation is large amounts of compute power, which we have, and large amounts of data, which we have. Imagine a system that can do on-the-fly translation of things like e-mail, documents and IM chat. That's a feature you can see on the horizon," said Google's Matt Glotzbach.

Apparently, Google is also developing tools for videoconferencing "to augment internal training programs and to serve as a hosted alternative to pricey videoconferencing software". Last year, Google acquired Marratech's video conferencing software.

In the past few years, Google started to preannounce features and services, but they were either released late or not released at all. We're still waiting for phone calls in Google Talk, tasks in Google Calendar, Gmail folders, Knol, Google Health.

Google Tests Video Ads Alongside Search Results

In February we found out that Google intends to test video ads next to search results and now we can finally see some examples. Digital Inspiration spotted an AT&T ad targeted to the query [phone], but there's also an Intel ad when you search for [laptop]. Google uses plusboxes to show that there's a video ad that complements the text and labels them with messages like: "watch commercial", "watch demonstration", "watch testimonial".


The video ad is triggered only after you click on the message and it's a small 160x140 video that uses the Google Video player. The ads are very short (around 30 seconds) and they end by displaying a clickable URL to the landing page.


Google uses the same visual elements as for the search results and user are already used to previewing YouTube videos by clicking on the small plus sign bellow the snippets. Unlike the video search results, Google doesn't include thumbnails next to video ads, but this may change in the future. Overall, the video ads from Google's search results aren't annoying, they must be explicitly selected and they offer more details that couldn't be included in the short text ad.

Google Docs Gets a Menu

After updating the toolbar, Google Docs replaced the tabbed interface with a traditional menu. The File menu looks cleaner and integrates the revision history, the Edit includes some of the options that are missing from the toolbar (cut/copy/paste) and also the HTML code editor. It's amazing to see that Find & Replace is still in alpha and doesn't work as advertised. The Insert menu has the same features as the homonymous tab, Format replaces the Styles dropdown, while Tools lets you select the document's language, check the spelling and read stats about the document. The Table menu was previously available as a contextual menu for tables and there's a new Share drop-down that integrates the options to share a page, publish it on the web and preview it.


Google Docs includes all the menus from Microsoft Word 2003, except for View, Window and Help, but there's enough room to add more menus in the future. The team's blog explains the changes by invoking a user study, but the truth is that most people are used to Microsoft Office's classic interface:

A while ago, our Docs User Research team worked on a "card-sort" study in which we disconnected all features in the application from the places we had put them in the UI, and asked some people what the labels and icons meant to them, and how they would group the concepts they represented. One of the things we found was that names such as File, Edit, Format, and Tools resonated as "where you might look" for certain editing features. Check spelling? Seems to fit in a "Tools" group to many people. Find and replace? People generally look for that in an "Edit" group.

These updates are only for the word processing application, as Google Spreadsheets and Presently continue to use the old interface. Having an unified interface and a set of features that work consistently in all the three applications should be a priority for Google.

Custom Google Search

Google has been experimenting with letting users reorder and remove search results. This may seem strange if you think that Google cares a lot about algorithmically ranking search results. The new options allow you to promote some of the results at the top of the page, hide the results you think are not relevant and add new web pages that are missing from Google's results. These changes are saved in your Google account and only influence your results. For now, the users who see the experimental feature are randomly selected.


These new personalization options can be partly recreated using a custom search engine. You can build a custom search engine for the entire web, that should include all the sites from Google's index. Every time you find web pages or web sites that are not very useful, but have good rankings, you can edit the search engine and them to the exclusion list.


To promote search results, check this option in the custom search engine's settings: "Add my Subscribed Link to this Custom Search Engine". Then create subscribed links for some of the terms you search often. Alternatively, you could use Google Spreadsheets to define a list of subscribed links. The subscribed links are also included if you use Google's standard search engine, but they're displayed after the third search result.


The custom search engine lacks the user interface options from Google's experimental feature, but it's a pretty powerful way to customize your search experience.

Useful links:
Manage your custom search engines
Manage your subscribed links

Useful Google Translate Addresses

Translate a web page:

http://www.google.com/translate_c?langpair=LANG1|LANG2&u=URL

Example: http://www.google.com/translate_c?langpair=it|en&u=http://www.corriere.it/ translates Corriere della Sera's homepage from Italian into English.


Translate a web page into English (the input language is detected automatically):

http://www.google.com/translate_c?langpair=en&u=URL

Example: http://www.google.com/translate_c?langpair=en&u=http://www.corriere.it/ translates Corriere della Sera's homepage from Italian into English, but without explicitly mentioning that the web page is written in Italian.


Use Google Translate as a proxy:

http://www.google.com/translate_c?langpair=LANG1|LANG2&u=URL

You basically want to read the page in its initial language, but loaded from Google's servers. LANG2 should be the code for your web page's language, while LANG1 can be any supported language so that LANG1|LANG2 is a valid language pair.

Example: http://www.google.com/translate_c?langpair=fr|en&u=http://craigslist.org shows Craigslist's home page using Google Translate as a way to bypass security restrictions.


Translate a text:

http://www.google.com/translate_t?langpair=LANG1|LANG2&text=TEXT

Example: http://www.google.com/translate_t?langpair=en|es&text=Hello, world! translates "Hello, world!" from English into Spanish.


Notes:

1. the language pairs are listed in this FAQ, while the language codes are included in this long list.

2. To disable Google Translate's annoying tooltips that show the original text, block this JavaScript file: http://209.85.135.104/translate_c.js, for example by adding a new rule in Adblock Plus for Firefox or by using Opera's content blocker.

Expandable Google Search Box

If you entered long queries in a Google search box, you would notice that it's difficult to edit them because Google optimized the size of the box for short queries. Things have changed and now you can much bigger queries and Google will adjust the search box's size after you perform a search.

Google limits queries to 32 words, but most people don't need that many words. The average number of words in a Google query was 4 at the end of 2007.


Here's a comparison between Live Search, Yahoo Search and Google Search for the query [how do you distinguish between a 64 bit and a 32 bit operating system], one of the most popular queries that start with "how do you".