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".