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May 29, 2009

Google's Context-Sensitive Spell Checker

Spell checkers aren't usually very smart: they highlight words that aren't in a dictionary and suggest a list of similar words. Even if they take into account words that aren't included in dictionaries and they deal with plurals and verb tenses, most spell checkers can't find words that are used incorrectly in a context.

Wikipedia includes as an example: "Their coming too sea if its reel", a phrase that has 5 spelling mistakes, even though all the words can be found in the dictionary. If you enter this text in Gmail's editor and click on "Check spelling", Gmail won't find any error. Type the same text in Google's search box, and you'll get a "did you mean" message that suggests to search for "Their coming to see if its real". As you can see, Google's search box has a better spell checker than Gmail since it doesn't rely on a dictionary, it uses a huge amount of searches to determine what are the most probable sequences of words that follow a certain pattern. Unfortunately, the spell checker available at Google.com is optimized for searches, which are usually short, so you can't use it to spell check an email message or a blog post.

Google Wave, the service demoed yesterday at Google I/O, includes a context-sensitive spell checker that highlights errors as you type. Google uses the language models built for Google Translate to find words that don't belong in a certain context.

May 28, 2009

Play Games in Google Talk

Google released a realtime gadgets API for Google Talk that's especially useful if you want to play games with your friends.

"gadgets.realtime and the APIs built on top of it allow gadget developers to write applications that communicate asynchronously with another endpoint, whether that endpoint is another instance of the application (on another machine, or in another browser, for example), the container hosting the gadget, or an application hosted in the cloud. The obvious application of these APIs is 1:1 gaming -- at its most basic a Tic-Tac-Toe game between two users. However there are many other more complex (and arguably -- depending on your thoughts about games -- more interesting) scenarios that these APIs enable; for instance, a chat application that translates text as participants type it, or a shared whiteboard, or an application that lets a couple choose the best flight for their upcoming vacation."

For now, the APIs are only available in a developer sandbox, which includes a special interface of Gmail Chat. Here's how you can play chess with one of your friends:

* Go to the sandbox and send this link to your friend: http://talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/sandbox .

* When your friend started to use Gmail Chat's sandbox, click on "Options", select "Start application", paste the following address:
and press Enter.

If you don't know how to play chess, try two other applications:

* a very simple rock-paper-scissors game:

* an automatic translation application:

{ via Google Talk Blog. Thanks, Niranjan. }

Google Wave

Google Wave is a new communication service previewed today at Google I/O. "A wave is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more."


Google Wave has been designed by the founders of Where 2 Tech, a start-up acquired by Google to create a cutting-edge mapping service, which later became Google Maps.

"Back in early 2004, Google took an interest in a tiny mapping startup called Where 2 Tech, founded by my brother Jens and me. We were excited to join Google and help create what would become Google Maps. But we also started thinking about what might come next for us after maps. As always, Jens came up with the answer: communication. He pointed out that two of the most spectacular successes in digital communication, email and instant messaging, were originally designed in the '60s to imitate analog formats — email mimicked snail mail, and IM mimicked phone calls. Since then, so many different forms of communication had been invented — blogs, wikis, collaborative documents, etc. — and computers and networks had dramatically improved. So Jens proposed a new communications model that presumed all these advances as a starting point; I was immediately sold," explains Lars Rasmussen.

"In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It's concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content -- it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use "playback" to rewind the wave to see how it evolved."

You can see some screenshots of the service and find some details about the API that could be used to extend the service and the Wave protocol that allows anyone to run a "wave" server. Google promises that Google Wave will be available later this year.

Customize Google Using Server-Side Scripts

Google's services have a lot of powerful features, but they can't offer all the options requested by users. A popular way to customize Google services is using Greasemonkey scripts: some of the most popular scripts are included in Firefox extensions like Customize Google or Better Gmail. While user scripts can help you tweak Google features, they need to be installed on each browser you use and they can be easily be rendered useless after Google changes the code.

A different approach to extend Gmail's functionality was Gmail Labs, which allowed you to pick add-ons that are dynamically integrated in Gmail. Depending on the Gmail add-ons that you select, you'll run one of the many possible customized versions of Gmail. For now, only Gmail engineers add Google Labs features.

I'm sure that many Greasemonkey users would like to add upload a script to Gmail or Google Docs so that it's saved on Google's servers and it no longer requires Greasemonkey. Ideally, the script should use Google APIs instead of manipulating the DOM directly.

Google Scripts is answer to this problem, it's a way to extend the functionality offered by services like Google Docs, Gmail or Google Calendar.
With scripts, you can:

* Create your own custom spreadsheet functions
* Automate repetitive tasks (e.g. process responses to Google Docs forms)
* Link multiple Google products together (e.g. send emails or schedule Calendar events from a list of addresses in a Spreadsheet)
* Customize existing Google products (e.g. add custom buttons or menus to run your own scripts)

The scripts help you add macros to a Google spreadsheet by writing some JavaScript code in Google's script editor. "Google Apps Script provides the ability to automate a variety spreadsheet actions, such as reading and changing values in cells and ranges, changing formats and formulas, and creating custom functions," explains Jonathan Rochelle.

But the feature goes beyond spreadsheet macros. "Users write scripts in JavaScript using libraries designed to provide a powerful interface with Google products. If you already are a JavaScript developer, a key difference is that scripts run on Google Servers instead of user browsers. As a result, direct operations on the client-side DOM are not supported, although some restricted functionality is provided. Your code executes server-side, and operates on the Google products you've coded for."

For now, Google Scripts is not publicly available, but you can apply to become a tester if you have a Google Apps account.

{ via Google Blogoscoped }

May 27, 2009

Google Tennis OneBox

Google has a new OneBox that shows the latest results from Roland Garros, an important tennis tournament held in Paris. If you search for [roland garros] or [tennis], Google shows some recent results, but it's probably a better idea to search for a player's name.

This is not the only sports-related Google OneBox: you can also find results from football (or soccer), the National Hockey League (NHL), National Basketball Association (NBA), Major League Baseball (MLB), cricket, NASCAR or Formula 1.

{ Merci, Jean-Noël. }

Google Friend Connect Adds Global Conversations

Web Elements is Google's new one-stop shop for services that can be embedded into any web page without requiring coding skills. You can embed maps, search results, calendars, news, spreadsheets, presentations, YouTube channels, but all of these features were already available in similar formats.

Friend Connect added an interesting web element for global conversations. "A global conversation is a conversation that takes place on several web site simultaneously. You can tell that you are looking at a global conversation because it says "Global conversation - learn more" underneath the title of the conversation. When you post to a global conversation, such as "mandolins", the post not only shows up on the web site where you posted it, but it also shows up on any site that chooses to embed the conversation, now or in the future."

So you can create an ad-hoc chat room that can be embedded in any web page that will continue the conversation. Friend Connect comes with an authentication system that doesn't require creating a new account, an option to use existing profiles, threaded comments, basic spam filtering, comment translation and other useful features.

Extending Google Chrome


* you don't need to restart the browser after installing an extension



{ via Chromium blog }

May 26, 2009

Google Enhances Snippets with Thumbnails




Bing, Live Search's New Interface

Microsoft's search engine didn't manage to become successful, despite of its many improvements, rebrandings and promotions. Nielsen reported that Live Search's US market share in the US was 9.9%, while Hitwise reported that the most commonly searched terms on Live Search are "Google" and "Yahoo".

Microsoft has many new distribution deals for Live Search, but the main problem is to have a product that's good enough to keep the new users. The next iteration of Live Search, that will be publicly available soon, integrates PowerSet's technology to offer an enhanced view for Wikipedia pages, shows only the top result for many navigational queries and an automatically generated menu of related searches. The service saves a list of recent searches and displays them in the left sidebar, next to the search refinements.

Live Search's new homepage

For navigational queries, only the top result is displayed. In some cases, you'll also see a customer service phone number (but not if you're searching for "google").

Live Search shows the top results for related queries on the same page. If you search for "audi a4", you'll also get results for "audi a4 repair", "audi a4 used", "audi a4 reviews" etc.

When you mouse over a search result, Live Search shows a longer snippet and more related pages

The enhanced view for Wikipedia pages isn't very exciting, unlike the similar feature from PowerSet

Unfortunately, I didn't see any improvements in ranking search results, so the only thing that's changed is the user interface. Live Search's interface is closer to an encyclopedia page, but I'm not sure if overloading users with information is the solution to offering better results.

AdAge suggests that Live Search will have a catchier name: Bing and Microsoft will pay $80 million for promoting the search engine. "People with knowledge of the planned push said the ads won't go after Google, or Yahoo for that matter, by name. Instead, they'll focus on planting the idea that today's search engines don't work as well as consumers previously thought by asking them whether search (aka Google) really solves their problems. That, Microsoft is hoping, will give consumers a reason to consider switching search engines, which, of course, is one of Bing's biggest challenges."

New features rarely bring more users to a search engine, even if they're useful and innovative. People want a search engine that constantly offers good search results, not just for popular searches or for a few hand-picked queries.

Update (June 1st): The new interface is now available at bing.com. As I already mentioned, there's no significant improvement in ranking the results, so Bing is Live Search with a new interface and a new way to display the same poor results.

May 23, 2009

A Feed for YouTube Subscriptions

Last year I wrote about some feeds offered by YouTube that weren't available in the interface. Since then YouTube added feeds for search results, videos from a channel and even from your subscriptions: just click on the orange icon from the address bar and you should see the feeds.

That means you no longer have to visit YouTube's homepage to find new videos from your subscriptions. You can subscribe to the following feed in Google Reader or another feed reader:

(replace "username" with your YouTube username)

The great thing is that you can subscribe to other users' feeds. For example, you'll find a lot of interesting videos in Google's subscriptions, which include channels like: Webmaster Help, Google Talks, Google Developers etc.

If not all the videos are interesting to you, use the query parameter to show only the videos that include certain keywords in their titles or descriptions. For example:


Read more about YouTube's feeds in the Data API reference guide.

May 22, 2009

Share Collections of Feeds in Google Reader





Here are two examples of bundles: Apple and Google blogs.

{ via Google Reader blog }

Google Reader Gets More Social






{ via Blogoscoped Forum }

Bookmark Google Maps Search Results




{ Thanks, Imma. }

May 21, 2009

Chrome 2.0 - Better, Faster, Stronger





Google Maps Shows Suggested Routes

If you don't like the driving directions offered by Google Maps, you can now choose between 3 suggested routes and compare them on the map. Of course, you can still add multiple destinations to restrict the routes generated by Google Maps.

Here are some tips to get better directions:
  • To reorder segments of your trip, drag and drop the destinations in the left panel.

{ via Benjamin Golub }

Shared SearchWiki Notes

Google tests a feature that allows you to share results voted or annotated using SearchWiki. Sharing your customized search results page could be useful when you want to help other people solve a problem. Instead of linking to "Let me Google that for you", send them to a page with hand-picked search results and comments.

Here's an example of shared SearchWiki page. You'll probably notice the "pov" parameter which stands for "point of view". In the future, Google could link the SearchWiki pages to Google Profiles or even suggest relevant collections in a special OneBox.

{ Thanks, Brian. }

Import iGoogle Feeds into Google Reader

Google Reader added an option to import the feeds from iGoogle, but you'll be able to use it only the first time you load the feed reader or by opening the welcome page. I assume that Google Reader wanted to help iGoogle users who need a more powerful feed reader.

The process of importing feeds is extremely painful, since Google Reader subscribes to each feed one by one. If you only have 5-10 feeds in iGoogle, it will import the feeds quickly, but you'll need to wait a lot longer if you have more than 50 subscriptions.

You can select the feeds that should be imported and Google Reader will convert iGoogle's tabs into folders.

Last year, I wrote a script that exports iGoogle feeds to OPML, so you can import them in other feed readers. It's more difficult to use than Google Reader's feature, but at least it's efficient.

Gmail Magic Inbox

Gmail's code reveals an upcoming feature called "magic inbox" or "icebox inbox", which is likely to prioritize the messages sent by your friends and other contacts you email frequently.

In 2007, RarePlay reported about the social features that would be included in email services. "E-mail providers like Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and others are now incorporating social networking functionality in their email offerings in mapping out the relationships between people and how are they related (social graph). An interesting experiment Yahoo (and similarly Google) is undertaking internally is called "Friend Finder". Friend Finder analyzes a user’s email traffic and indicates the friends with whom a user has strong email connections based on incoming/outgoing traffic and the frequency and speed in which two parties respond to each other." While Yahoo has already released an early version of the social application, Google has yet to make an announcement.

Some other messages from Gmail's code suggest that we'll be able to sort messages by priority and save messages in an outbox to be sent at a later time.

Gmail still have important features to be released before removing the "beta" tag:

Google Image Search Refining Experiment

Cameron Beyer spotted a Google Image Search experiment that shows suggestions next to some of the search results. When searching for "flower", Google displayed suggestions like "rose flower", "yellow flower", "murakami" next to some of the images.

This seems to be a quick and dirty to refine search results until the similar images experiment from Google Labs is integrated in Google Image Search.

{ Thanks, Cameron. }

Ads in Google Suggest

Google Suggest has been recently updated to include top search results and search buttons, but the most surprising additions are sponsored links. Here's how Google explains why you'll sometimes see ads below the suggestions:

"Similar to the navigational suggestions, sometimes we detect that the most relevant completion for what you're typing is an ad. When an ad is shown, we mark it with the text "Sponsored Link" and a colored background, as on the results page."

The updated Google Suggest will have an interesting side-effect: you'll see the search results pages less often. Google saves you a few clicks by suggesting search results directly from the homepage, much like Google Chrome's omnibox, but monetizing the suggestions seems out of place. The ads draw attention from the list of suggestions, they're unnecessarily large and they clutter the interface.

Hopefully, Google won't show sponsored links in the list of suggestions very often and Google will focus on adding useful suggestions like: unit conversions, results from Google Calculator, facts etc.

Side notes:
* I don't see the ads in Google Suggest, so maybe the feature hasn't been publicly launched yet.
* Is this the first time when Google shows third-party ads on the homepage?

May 19, 2009

Google Suggest Improves


* being able to remove suggestions from your search history




* removing the number of results for each suggested query

Suggestions aren't useful just on the homepage.



Gmail Added Message Translation

As previously anticipated, Gmail Labs added a feature that translates messages written in a foreign language. After enabling "Message translation" in Gmail Labs, you'll be able to translate any messages written in other languages by clicking on "Translate message to: English".

"When Gmail detects one of your messages is in a language other than your default language, you'll see a header at the top of the message. Click the link that says Translate message to.... Your message will be translated inline (no need to open a new tab or window). Or if you want to translate the message and print it too, you can click the down arrow next to the Reply button and select Translate and print. You can also translate an entire conversation. Just click the globe icon on the right side of the conversation and you're good to go," informs the help center.

To find messages written in other languages use the lang: operator and search for lang:fr, lang:es, lang:chinese or something similar. Now you're finally able to understand the strange messages from your spam folder.

{ Thanks, Niranjan and Meghan. }

Google Sites Design Refresh






{ Thanks, Stefano. }

OffiSync - Integrate Google Docs with Microsoft Office

OffiSync is a plug-in for Microsoft Office 2003/2007 that integrates the office suite with Google Docs. You can open documents, spreadsheets and presentations already saved in Google Docs, edit them in Microsoft Office and save the files in Google Docs. The add-on creates a new revision of the document when you save it, but there's no option to automatically save the document periodically.

You can view the files from multiple Google accounts and Google Apps accounts, so the add-on is a good option to virtually merge your accounts. Since the plug-in doesn't offer all the features available in Google Docs, you'll still need to open the online interface to publish a document, to use gadgets in Google Spreadsheets or to collaborate with other users. While you can manage the collaborators in Microsoft Office, you can't collaborate in real-time and your changes will overwrite the changes made by your collaborators.

Despite its name, OffiSync doesn't actually sync Google Docs with your computer and it doesn't even show the most current version of a document, assuming that other people edited it after you opened the document in Microsoft Office.

It could be an option for those who aren't comfortable with using an online office application, but they want to backup the documents online. It's probably not a good idea to use it this way since Google Docs doesn't have all the features that are available in Microsoft Office and the documents won't look the same. In its current incarnation, the plug-in isn't very useful for those who use the collaboration features from Google Docs.

Here are some potential uses:

* create a document in Microsoft Word and quickly import it in Google Docs, without using the online interface
* open a document created in Google Docs to improve the layout before printing it
* use some functions from Microsoft Excel that aren't available in Google Spreadsheets

May 18, 2009

How to Use Google Docs Folders as Labels

Google Docs has a flexible system of organizing documents. While initially Google Docs used a labeling system similar to the one from Gmail, the current version combines the benefits of labels with the simplicity of folders. The interface names them folders, but they're actually hierarchical labels.

You can add a document to multiple folders without creating copies. Just go to "all items" and drag the document to more than one folder. Since the sidebar doesn't show subfolders, you can't drag the document to a subfolder.

What if you want to remove one of the labels? There's no interface option for this, but you can use this workaround: click on the label you want to remove in the sidebar and drag the document to one of the other labels. To remove all the labels, drag the document to "Items not in folders".

Google's hybrid between folders and labels still needs some improvement: subfolders are not displayed in the sidebar, you can't add multiple labels in a single step and it's not obvious that folders are actually labels.

May 16, 2009

What's in Store for Google Search?

Google experiments with a lot of interesting new features, but not all of them are publicly available. A post from Google's blog inadvertently revealed some experiments, by showing a list of iterations for the "search options" feature released this week.

The initial concepts for the "search options" panel included a lot of interesting enhancements:

* grouping search results by topic
* grouping search results by people
* showing page previews for search results
* showing only pages that you've seen or pages you haven't seen before

Google has previously tested an interface that grouped search results in predefined categories like reference or reviews, but it's not clear if "group by topic" works in a similar way or it's a different approach. To search pages you've seen before, there's Google Web History, but it's very slow and the ranking algorithm needs a lot of improvement.

Wolfram Alpha, the Answer Engine

Wolfram|Alpha launched yesterday and it's an useful complement to a general-purpose search engine like Google. Wolfram|Alpha doesn't search the web, it uses data from authoritative databases and an engine powered by Mathematica to obtain the results.


Even if the homepage's simplicity reminds you of Google, it's a good idea to check the examples page before entering a query. Alpha can't handle any kind of query, so it's important to know its strengths: advanced Math calculations (graphs, equations, prime numbers computations, matrix operations), conversions, facts about weather, population, food, minerals, people, places.

You can enter simple things like numbers, dates, words, HTML color codes, chemical formulas and you'll get a lot of interesting information. The service shows intuitive visualizations and comparisons to better understand the information.

Wolfram|Alpha could be a great way to expand Google Calculator and other Google OneBoxes.

May 15, 2009

How to Customize or Disable Google Update

For regular users, having a silent application that constantly updates the browser is a good thing. There's no annoying interface that interrupts you to ask your permission before updating the application and you no longer have to manually check for updates. Unfortunately, Google Chrome's automatic updater is not a great feature if you have limited bandwidth or in an enterprise environment, since you can't customize it.

Now you can use the Group Policy Editor from Windows or add some Registry keys to customize Google Update. Google Update for Enterprise explains how you can import an administrative template in the Local Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc) and change the auto-update check period or even disable the auto-updater.

You can configure separate policies for different Google applications, allow only manual updates and even prevent the applications from installing on your computer.

If your operating doesn't include a policy editor (Windows XP Home, Windows Vista Home), edit the Registry directly. Just create the following key:


and add two DWORD values:

AutoUpdateCheckPeriodMinutes - auto-update check interval (for example: 1440 to check for updates once a day)
DisableAutoUpdateChecksCheckboxValue - 1, if you want to disable the auto-updater; 0, if you want to enable it.

"We work hard to keep our users safe and secure when using our applications, and we believe that making sure users have the latest software available using automatic updates is a key component of that. However, we realize that there are situations where automatic updates may not be desirable so we wanted to provide the ability to control updates when necessary," says David Dorwin, from the Google Update Team.

May 14, 2009

Google News Redesign


Google News homepage

Sci-Tech section of Google News


The last Google News comments

May 13, 2009

Migrate to Gmail from Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail



