Google Shows the Indexing Date for Each Search Result

If you use Google's advanced options to restrict the search results to a certain period of time, you'll find that Google shows the date when each web page has been first indexed (in many cases, this is a good approximation of the date when a web page has been created).


As previously mentioned, you can edit Google's URL to customize how fresh the search results should be. For example, if you append &as_qdr=y9 to Google's search URL, you'll restrict the results to web pages first indexed by Google in the last 9 years. Since this restriction should include all web pages from Google's index, you can use it to display the timestamp next to each search result (e.g.: a search for iPod).

Maybe in the future Google will display the date next to each search result, it will try to approximate the date when a page has been created, allow users to filter results from certain periods and sort the results by date.

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Interesting Results from Google Blog Search

Even it still has problems with duplicate content and spam, Google Blog Search has an important advantage over other blog search engines: it actually finds the most important search results. This is the default option for displaying results and it's recommended to use it even if you only want to read fresh news, as you can change the time interval to "last hour" or "last 12 hours".

Google's blog search engine lacks a homepage that displays the most important posts from the blogosphere, but there's a way to find interesting posts without entering a query. For some strange reason, if you search for [label:keyword] or [view:keyword] (keyword can be anything you like), Google ignores your query and displays a list of blog posts. We can assume it's a list of blog posts relevant for any query.


Related:
How Google Blog Search ranks results

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Finding Places of Interest in Google Maps

Google Maps has a very useful mapplet (what's a mapplet?) that shows places of interest from a list of categories. You can select the mapplet by going to the My Maps tab and clicking on Featured content > Places of interest.

Instead of searching for bars, restaurants, hospitals, shopping malls, you can select these categories in the left sidebar and see all the places that match your selection. Unlike the standard search results, the mapplet shows many more places and you can use it to see the picture: for example, to estimate the distribution of restaurants in a certain area. Google Maps lets you select more than one mapplet, so you can also activate the distance measurement tool, the Panoramio layer with beautiful photos or the popular community maps.

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Google Goes to Disneyland

This year, Google's employees didn't go on the traditional ski trip due to the size of the company, so they went to Disneyland for three days, from 4 to 6 February. Here's how Googlers described the trip:

"Monday through Wednesday, Googlers from the West Coast offices headed down to Anaheim for a visit to place of a 'million dreams.' Suffice it to say, it was an incredible experience. I got to go on rides I had gone on over 10 years ago - including Space Mountain, Matterhorn, and Star Tours. And, I got to ride the new rides - California Soarin', California Screamin', Buzz Lightyear, and Indiana Jones. From 8pm-1am, the park was open only to Googlers, with our very own fireworks show and no waits in the lines." (Reid)

"Tomorrow I'll be on my way (...) to LAX and then to Anaheim for Google's yearly ski-trip! Oh wait. There's no skiing in Anaheim. So what's this all about? Well it turns out that Google with its 16,805 employees is now so big that we cannot by any means rent enough rooms in Tahoe, so it was decided to give us a choice this year: Camping at the Pinnacles National Monument south of Salinas, CA (bring your own tent!) or Disneyland! Google's got the whole park just for Googlers after 8pm on Tuesday [February 5th]", writes Ulf Waschbusch.

"One of the things I can most prominently remember about my childhood is Disney cartoons. There was a stage when Mickey, Donald, Pluto, Goofy meant more in life than probably computers mean today. I visited Disneyland at Anaheim near Los Angeles. Many thanks to Google for the company trip. (...) Disneyland is a childhood dream come true. One less thing left to do in life." (Nirnimesh, a Googler from Hyderabad, India)


"Absolutely amazing time. The organization of the trip was second-to-none... pretty much what you'd expect from Google. I couldn't even imagine what a logistical nightmare organizing something like this must have been. They flew about 5,000 people down from three different airports in the bay area, to three different airports in Los Angeles area. Shuttles were organized to take us from those three airports to about 10 different hotels where the Googlers were staying. At the airports, for most of us who only had carry-on luggage, we were handed our boarding passes after showing ID and went straight to security (after waiting on a Google line for a quite some time but what would you expect?!). When we arrived at the airport (going down and coming back), there wasn't a single moment where the Googlers weren't informed where we were supposed to go to catch our shuttle. (...) There's definitely a reason why Google's the number one employer to work for. This was the most fun I've had since I moved out here." (Billy)



More photos of Google's trip to Disneyland: Arturo, Ana, Rosalie, Cynthia, Michael, Tessa, Gregory.

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iGoogle's Settings Page

Google's personalized homepage (a.k.a. iGoogle) has a settings page where you can change the language, your location and some things related to tabs (name, theme, layout). You still can't reorder the tabs or make some special changes that aren't available in the main interface.

The settings page would probably be more useful if it had support for batch operations like deleting multiple gadgets or moving all the gadgets that contain "Google" in the title to a new tab.

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Local Sections in Google News

There's a new type of section you can add to Google News: the local section. Type your location (or any other location) and Google will show you the most relevant news related to your location. Until now, you could create a custom section that showed the most important news that contained your terms, but the new location does a better job at identifying locations.

"While we're not the first news site to aggregate local news, we're doing it a bit differently -- we're able to create a local section for any city, state or country in the world and include thousands of sources. We're not simply looking at the byline or the source, but instead we analyze every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located," mentions Google News Blog.


You can create as many local sections as you want by clicking on "Edit this personalized page" and selecting "Add a local section". It would be nice if Google News adds the layout options from iGoogle and makes it easier to rearrange the sections and add new content. Google could also display a lot of interesting content about a location (popular videos, photos, blog posts, events, community maps) in a special iGoogle tab.

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Add Data to Google Spreadsheets Using Forms

Google Spreadsheets has a new feature that lets you create a form to accept data. When you go to the Share tab, there's a new option to "invite people to fill out a form". The form is very simple and can be customized by changing the order of entries, their labels and the type of answers. It's also a nice way to get feedback people who wouldn't normally collaborate on a spreadsheet.

You can create forms from spreadsheets or using this URL. To keep track of your forms, add this gadget to iGoogle.

I created a form that lets you add your favorite Google service (the form has a public page that I embedded below) and here's the entire spreadsheet with all the answers.



Update. Here are the results of your votes:

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A More Powerful Google Navigation Bar

iGoogleBar is a Firefox extension that enhances Google's navigation bar by showing the number of unread Gmail messages (only from the inbox) and the number of unread posts in Google Reader. The extension also adds icons that open Google gadgets for each service so you can preview your Gmail inbox from Google Calendar or open a recent document from Google Notebook.

For example, in the screenshot below, I visit Google Docs, but I can see that there is a single new post in Google Reader, only two unread messages in my inbox and I can easily open a bookmark from Google Notebook.

Unfortunately, the new navigation bar is displayed after the page loads, it works only in Google's communication apps and it doesn't include the More dropdown. Another big drawback is that the extension is actually a Chickenfoot script that comes with its rendering engine, which is terribly slow. In fact, the extension's XPI file has 1 MB, almost the same as Google Toolbar for Firefox.


{ via Googlified }

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Google Offers Security Services for Mail Servers

Google acquired last year Postini, a company that offered hosted services for email servers. "Postini invented the software as a service approach to providing communications security and compliance, and holds two fundamental patents in the space, with more patents pending." Google integrated a small part of the offering in Google Apps Premier Edition: policy management, spam/virus filtering and 90-days message recovery.

Now Google offers the rest of the Postini services under the Google Apps umbrella, but without tying them with Google Apps Premier Edition and Gmail. Google Apps Security Services work with the most important email servers (Microsoft Exchange Server, Lotus Domino, Postfix, Sendmail, Macintosh OS X Server, Novell Groupwise) and offer three levels of protection, priced differently:


* message filtering: anti-spam, anti-virus, anti-phishing, and malware protection for inbound messages - $3/user/year
* message security: inbound and outbound mail filtering, email encryption, content policy management - $12/user/year
* message discovery: the same as above plus one-year message archiving, audit reports - $25/user/year

For educational institutions and non-profit organizations, the prices are much smaller: $1, $4 and $8.33/user/year. For all the services, Google provides 99.999% service level assurance.

Here's how the service works: you change the MX records to point your mail traffic to Google's data centers and all the bad traffic will be stopped before reaching your mail server. Google processes email in RAM and doesn't write the valid messages to disk.

Google provides multiple layers of protection against viruses. The service leverages its visibility to emerging threats by monitoring attacks against our customer base and - in real-time - blocks IP addresses that are issuing virus attacks. In addition, Google utilities multiple anti-virus protections including zero-hour heuristics, coupled with multiple commercial anti-virus engines to detect existing and emerging threats.

As with our virus protection, Google leverages visibility into billions of daily message connections to monitor spam attacks and blocks the most obvious spam. Our heuristic engine then filters the incoming mail traffic and captures any suspicious messages. This is all performed in real-time (processed in RAM memory in our data centers) without delays to your email delivery. With these capabilities, Google combines an extremely effective capture rate with an exceptionally low false positive rate.

Google says that Postini already has 40,000 customers and 14 million users and these affordable prices should increase the user base. Unfortunately, the association between these security services and Google Apps might confuse the potential clients and make them think that the services are only available for Gmail.

In fact, Gmail already includes anti-spam, basic anti-virus, anti-phishing and the corporate version of Google Apps includes content policy management and basic message archiving at no additional cost. Maybe Google will use the data obtained from Postini's services to enhance Gmail's security features.

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Could Google Save Yahoo from Microsoft?

Microsoft is taking over Yahoo! by Gnal.
Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution.

Even if it's hard to believe that Yahoo will accept it, there's a simple way to make Yahoo more profitable: drop its search advertising service and use Google AdWords. Google has a better technology for ranking ads, a bigger inventory and higher click-through rates. If Google accepts to offer Yahoo most of the earnings, it's likely that Yahoo's profits will make investors happy again.

According to Wall Street Journal, "Google Inc. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt called Yahoo Inc. CEO Jerry Yang to offer his company's help in any effort to thwart Microsoft Corp.'s unsolicited $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo, say people familiar with the matter. (...) Google could play a role in attempts by others to outbid Microsoft, or by Yahoo to remain independent. Google could potentially offer money, or guaranteed revenue in return for a Yahoo advertising outsourcing pact, under that scenario."

There are rumors that Yahoo already negotiates with Google the outsourcing of its search ads in Europe. This could be a good news for Google, who also provides ads for Ask.com.

In a harsh post from the official Google blog, David Drummond is worried that Microsoft's acquisition of Yahoo could jeopardize Internet's openness: "Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies -- and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets. (...) Microsoft plus Yahoo! equals an overwhelming share of instant messaging and web email accounts. And between them, the two companies operate the two most heavily trafficked portals on the Internet. Could a combination of the two take advantage of a PC software monopoly to unfairly limit the ability of consumers to freely access competitors' email, IM, and web-based services?"

It's not clear if Google is truly worried by this potential acquisition, since a Microsoft+Yahoo company would be very far from Google's dominant position in search and search ads*, while Yahoo's absorption would take a lot of time. Microsoft has already admitted that it can't compete with Google online by trying to acquire Yahoo and it chose a very bad moment in Yahoo's history to force the acquisition.

* According to Microsoft, Google gets 75% of worldwide revenues in search ads and has 65% search market share in the US and 85% in Europe.

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Data Visualization Google Gadgets

Last year, Google acquired a data visualization technology from Gapminder, a Swedish non-profit organization. Gapminder's technology, Trendalyzer, was used to visualize data from United Nations Common Database in an intuitive way. To quote from Gapminder's site, "this software unveils the beauty of statistical time series by converting boring numbers into enjoyable, animated and interactive graphics." For example, you could see the evolution of carbon dioxide emissions in a country over time or find correlations between CO2 emissions and the income per capita.

Google probably intends to use this technology to visualize custom data. One of the interfaces that will allow you create your own Trendalyzer visualizations is an iGoogle gadget which creates a Flash multi dimensional chart. The input is a file with the following structure: the first column is the item's name, the second is time, the third is for x-coordinates, the forth is for y-coordinates, and the fifth is the size of a ball. I tried to upload a file that has this structure, but the gadget didn't accept it. The gadget is probably a part of a new service that also hosts your data.


This is not the only data visualization gadget developed. Another gadget creates an interactive table that supports filtering and grouping, the simple table gadget lets you perform queries, while the heat map gadget "displays a map with color intensities that match given values". There are also gadgets for pie charts, column charts, bar charts, area charts, image lines, scatter charts, organizational charts, time series.


Hopefully we'll be able to actually use these gadgets and Google will create a service around visualizing data.

Update: The gadgets are a part of a new Google Spreadsheets feature.

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Search, Ads, Yahoo and Microsoft

While everyone comments about Microsoft's offer to buy Yahoo, I think it's interesting to look back at the struggle to stop Google's domination in search and PPC ads.

Yahoo Inc. yesterday announced plans to buy Internet advertising firm Overture Services Inc. for $1.63 billion in stock and cash in a move designed to help the online giant exploit the growing market for sponsored search results. (...)

Overture, formerly known as GoTo.com, pioneered the approach of letting advertisers bid for the right to place their links alongside search terms and paying only when users click through to their Web site. Overture, based in Pasadena, Calif., claims 88,000 advertisers and licenses its commercial results to Yahoo, Microsoft's MSN.com and other Web portals. Google has copied Overture's business model and claims 100,000 advertisers. (...)

Overture sells sponsored search results to other portals besides Yahoo. Microsoft Corp.'s MSN.com is one of Overture's top customers, and analysts consider it highly unlikely the Redmond, Wash., software giant will want to continue using Overture's ad network once rival Yahoo completes the takeover.

(Washington Post, July 15, 2003)

On Thursday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said he regretted not spending more on in-house search research and development in the past, but said the company has addressed the oversight and plans to unveil its own search product within the next 12 months.

"Not only do I think Microsoft is capable of building extraordinary search technology, I believe Microsoft is hell-bent on developing that technology in Redmond (Wash.) without a material acquisition," said Rohan. "That is the Microsoft way."

(CNet, March 26, 2004)

Rashtchy estimated that the search industry will reach nearly $7 billion in revenue by 2007, growing at a compounded rate of 35% each year. Those kinds of numbers attract a lot of attention. In 2003, Yahoo!, which was outsourcing its search to Google, wanted in on the action and paid $1.63 billion to buy Overture. Last month Yahoo! dumped Google and now exclusively uses Overture, officially declaring war. Sleeping giant Microsoft, meanwhile, was rumored to have made an unsuccessful stab at acquiring Google, and is now using its nearly infinite resources to improve it own search engine.

(Forbes, April 26, 2004)

Keyword search is the largest component of U.S. online advertising, and Google derives virtually all of its ad revenues from this category. The growth in that segment speaks for itself. Based on data from PricewaterhouseCoopers/IAB Internet Advertising Reports, the overall keyword search category generated $81 million in revenues in 2000, representing only 1% of overall online ad sales. Jump ahead to 2003, and keyword search accounted for $2.5 billion in revenues -- a hefty 35% of the total U.S. online ad-sales pie.

(BusinessWeek, June 11, 2004)

As previously reported, Microsoft's Internet group is developing a pay-per-click ad-bidding system that pairs search results with sponsored text messages from advertisers. Yahoo's Overture Services currently supplies MSN with sponsored search links, which complement MSN-sold "featured sites." (...) With the product, Microsoft will move into the mother lode of a multibillion-dollar ad business dominated by Google and Yahoo. Search-engine marketing is expected to be worth as much as $5 billion this year, and nearly $9 billion annually within four years, according to Jupiter Research. Microsoft's piece of the pie is smaller than the shares enjoyed by market leaders Yahoo and Google, and the software giant is hungry for more. Google fields 35.1 percent of the searches online, followed by Yahoo at 31.8 percent and MSN at 16 percent, according to ComScore QSearch.

(ZDNet, March 16, 2005)

Microsoft is taking on the great Google Money Machine with an inhouse answer to Google Adwords.

Step forward Microsoft adCenter, launched yesterday to pump out all-paid search traffic on MSN and other Microsoft online properties in the US. Microsoft’s adCenter replaces Yahoo!'s Overture as the paid-for search engine on MSN. The only surprise is how long it took Microsoft to make the switcheroo – predicted ever since Yahoo! bought Overture in 2003 – and confirmed this time last year by Microsoft at its annual MSN Strategic Account Summit.

(The Register, May 4, 2006)

The Internet search-advertising wars are getting hotter: Vowing to catch up to industry leader Google, Yahoo Monday will demonstrate an overhauled advertising system that promises to generate higher revenue and enlist more clients.

On May 4, Microsoft unveiled its own search advertising program and said it would invest up to $6 billion in a bid to catch up with Google.

Yet Google still easily dominates paid search ads — those little text ads that appear near search queries. The Internet powerhouse has made several enhancements to its search program as well.

Google says it hasn't heard anything from Yahoo or MSN to make it worry.

"There's been nothing that's announced that makes me want to change what we do," says Richard Holden, director of production management for Google's paid search programs.

(USA Today, May 14, 2006)

Struggling to make a dent in rival Google Inc.'s dominance over online search, Yahoo Inc. reported a quarterly decline in profit Tuesday but managed to match already lowered expectations. (...) During a Tuesday conference call with analysts, Susan Decker, who was promoted to president when Semel was replaced by Yang, acknowledged Yahoo's past failings.

She said the company had been slow to recognize emerging trends in online advertising and that Yahoo's management structure was overly complex, opening the door for more nimble competitors. (...)

Yahoo commanded an 18.3% share of paid-search marketing spending in June, up from May's 17.8%, Rohan said, but June's percentage is still the third lowest at Yahoo since January 2006.

"Google continues to dominate spending with over 75% market share," he wrote. "Panama stabilized Yahoo's market share slide, but has not reversed it."

Rohan said that even with Panama, advertisers see a better return on investment with Google, which boasts higher click-through rates at lower prices. "Yahoo's Panama was modestly successful but only temporarily halted Google's gains in marketshare," he said.

(Hollywood Reporter, July 18, 2007)

Despite the hopes of many and rumors that Yahoo would post "strong" earnings, Q4 2007 results were mixed, and net income was down from a year ago. In addition, CEO Jerry Yang said the company faced "headwinds" in 2008 and offered weak guidance but promised a return to growth in 2009. Investors were unhappy, and stock was down at one point 10 percent in after-hours trading (this morning it has recovered).

Total revenue in Q4 was $1.83 billion, which represented 8 percent growth of the same period a year ago ($1.7 billion). Full year 2007 revenues for Yahoo were $6.97 billion. Simultaneously, Yahoo announced it would be cutting 1,000 jobs.

(Search Engine Land, January 30, 2008)

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Social Graph API

In "Thoughts on the Social Graph", Brad Fitzpatrick wrote:

There are an increasing number of new "social applications" as well as traditional application which either require the "social graph" or that could provide better value to users by utilizing information in the social graph. What I mean by "social graph" is a the global mapping of everybody and how they're related, as Wikipedia describes and I talk about in more detail later. Unfortunately, there doesn't exist a single social graph (or even multiple which interoperate) that's comprehensive and decentralized. Rather, there exists hundreds of disperse social graphs, most of dubious quality and many of them walled gardens. (...) If I had to declare the problem statement succinctly, it'd be: People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site., but also: Developing "Social Applications" is too much work.

Five months later, Brad Fitzpatrick announced that Google will start to index FOAF files and the XFN microformats from web pages to gather publicly defined relations between people. For example, "XFN outlines the relationships between individuals by defining a small set of values that describe personal relationships. In HTML and XHTML documents, these are given as values for the rel attribute on a hyperlink. XFN allows authors to indicate which of the weblogs they read belong to friends, whom they've physically met, and other personal relationships."

It's easy to edit the links from your blogroll to highlight your friends or your acquaintances.

<a href="http://danielboyd.com/" rel="friend">Daniel</a>

You can also link to your other site or to your pages from Flickr, del.cio.us, Twitter etc. and consolidate your online identity:

<a href="http://twitter.com/ev" rel="me">My Twitters</a>

Google allows you to access these social relationships using a simple JSON API. The API could be used by social applications to discover some of your friends that already use the same application. "So you've just built a totally sweet new social app and you can't wait for people to start using it, but there's a problem: when people join they don't have any friends on your site. They're lonely, and the experience isn't good because they can't use the app with people they know. You could ask them to search for and add all their friends, but you know that every other app is asking them to do the same thing and they're getting sick of it." Since the data is already publicly available, this API makes it easy to discover your friends and let you select the ones you want to keep in the new context.

For example, Bradfitz from LiveJournal has a friend Jane274. When Brad joins Twitter, the API could discover that he also have a LiveJournal page and his LiveJournal friend Jane274 is the same as Jane from Twitter. This way, Brad found a friend who has a Twitter account.


Of course, the problem is that few people use FOAF and XFN to declare their relationships, but Google's new API could make them more visible and social applications could use them. Ultimately, Google could also index the relationships from social networks if people are comfortable with that.

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Personalizing Search Results Using Social Information

VentureBeat has an interview with Google's VP Marissa Mayer about social search. Marissa's definitions for social search is "any search aided by a social interaction or a social connection... Social search happens every day. When you ask a friend what movies are good to go see? or where should we go to dinner?, you are doing a verbal social search. You're trying to leverage that social connection to try and get a piece of information that would be better than what you'd come up with on your own."

She explains that Google tried to add a social layer by allowing its users to annotate search results in Google Co-op, but that didn't work very well. "There have been a few topical areas that have had a lot of traction, but overall the annotation model needs to evolve."


Marissa Mayer suggests that Google could show you the results labeled by the people you trust, for example your Facebook friends. Google could also personalize your search results by promoting web pages bookmarked by your friends. "PageRank itself relies on the link structure of the web to try to find the most authoritative pages. For example, it's clear that people would attribute more authority to the pages that their friends have visited."

Asked about the future of search, Marissa predicted that in ten years search engines will answer to queries like "what movies are good to see?", "where's the nearest sushi restaurant that's good?" by using information from the user's social context. Basically, the social data is just another way to personalize search results, along with your search history or your location.

Once your social data becomes portable (and OpenSocial could play an important role here), Google could use aggregate information from your friends to modify the weights in a personalized PageRank model.

Related:
Google and social search
Google's no-longer-existent Facebook app

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The Number of Google Subscribers

Google Reader Subscribers Count is a discreet Greasemonkey script that shows the number of Google subscribers to a site's feeds. The number is overlayed at the bottom of each page that has feeds and it's one of the ways you can measure the popularity of a site. If you click on the number, you can subscribe to the feed.

As usually, the script requires Firefox and the Greasemonkey extension, although it could also work in other browsers. A related script is Google Reader Subscribe Button, which shows if you've subscribed to a feed and lets you subscribe to it in Google Reader. It would be interesting to combine the two scripts.

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Tips for Google Mobile Search

Google's mobile search engine (google.com/m) has a lot of features that aren't available in the regular desktop interface. Its latest interface was launched in March last year in the US and yesterday in the UK, France, Germany and Canada. The main change in Google's mobile interface is the integration between the web results, images, news and local results, which are displayed on a single pages, based on their relevance to the query. Here are some features specific to Google Mobile Search:

1. Information about sports: European football, NBA, NHL and more.


2. Optimized calculator that shows the results in a search box so you can use them for other calculations.


3. Weather conditions for airports


4. Since Google shows the transcoded version of search results, it can improve the way you access the web pages. If the results are very big, Google splits them in several pages and it can send you directly to the section that is the most relevant to your query.

5. The phonebook listings let you call people directly from search results, the same as Google's local search results:


6. Google promotes the site specifically designed for mobile phones and you can recognize them by looking for a small phone icon next to the snippet.

7. You can hide the images from search results by clicking on "Hide Images" at the bottom of the page. Google only shows thumbnails, which load faster and are more appropiate for small screens.

8. If you enter your location on the homepage, you won't have to add it to your queries. Since Google knows you're in Boston, you should only enter "weather", "movies", "book stores" etc. Google also saves your recent locations and they're accessible from a drop-down next to each group of local search results.

9. Google reformats the links to point to the transcoded versions so you can use Google Mobile Search as a bridge between your mobile browser and the web. You won't be able to access through Google Mobile Search secure web pages and some web pages lose their functionality as Google removes embedded objects, JavaScript code, tables etc. There's also a simple interface for Google's transcoder that lets you enter a URL.

10. If you have a mobile browser that is able to display web pages, you can disable Google's transcoder by going to Settings and deactivating "Format web pages for your phone". You can also go to the standard Google interface by selecting "View Google in... classic" at the bottom of Google's homepage.

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Subscribe to Feeds in Google Reader Mobile

MG Siegler reports that the iPhone version of Google Reader has an option to add subscriptions. "Recently the 'Feeds' area welcomed the 'Add subscription' button that you'll recognize from the regular version of the site. Clicking on this button from the iPhone takes you to a 'Discover and search' page where you can search for a new feed or quickly add any of their pre-packaged bundles."

Not everyone has an iPhone and I'm sure this would be a welcome feature in the mobile Google Reader. Fortunately, the feature already exists, even if not in Google Reader, but in the mobile Google Search. To go from Google Reader to Google's homepage, click on "More Google Products" and select Search from the list. If you search the web using Google and click on a search result from a site that has feeds, the feeds are listed at the top. Clicking on a feed, you'll be able to preview it in Google Reader and also subscribe to it.

If you already know the address of a feed, you can use this URL to subscribe to it:
http://google.com/reader/m/view/feed/<FEED_URL>
(replace <FEED_URL> with the actual URL)


Related:
Mobile Google Reader is also a good way to read blogs on a mobile phone

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Display a Google Calendar in Google Maps

Tony Hirst found a simple way to place the events from a Google Calendar on a map. Assuming that the calendar is public, all you need to do is to find the XML address of the calendar, enter the address in a Yahoo Pipe that extracts the locations and generates a geoRSS feed, click on "More options" and copy the link to the KML output. You can enter the URL in a Google Maps search box and you'll see the events on a map. The items can be saved to My Maps or embedded into a web page if you select "Link to this page".

Tony notes that "the call to the Yahoo Pipe sometimes times out in the map. To guarantee the map displaying the KML feed, you could always save the KML feed as a KML file, then upload it somewhere and use that URL in the Google Map search box".

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Bookmark Google Search Results

An interesting side effect of Google Notebook's integration with Google Bookmarks is that you can now bookmark search results without having to install plug-ins or use bookmarklets. When you log in to a Google Account, a new option appears next to each search result: "note this". If you click on "note this", Google will open a small version of Google Notebook and add a link to the search result, the title and its snippet as a note. Google's service has a predefined notebook that stores bookmarks (Unfiled bookmarks), so Google also creates a bookmark from your link.

The only thing you need to do before clicking on "note this" is to make sure that the active notebook is "Unfiled bookmarks". You can click on the "My Notebooks" link from the top of Google's search results page to activate that notebook.

After bookmarking a page, you can add labels and comments. The bookmarks can be accessed from Google Notebook's mini-window, Google Bookmarks or from an iGoogle gadget, but also from plug-ins like Google Toolbar.

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Things Google Can Improve

Durrell Robinson has a lot of great ideas for Google and he decided to share them with you. I only selected some of the most interesting ideas and found their place inside this post.

Contact manager integration with Picasa Web Albums and customizable Facebook-like tags that allow you to tag a person you know in a picture you took and maybe even allow them to untag themselves like the Facebook allows. People will be more likely to upload and tag pictures if they are connected in some way to people they already know or have in their contact list. People are also more likely to make pictures public if they have a specific "public" in mind instead of the very large, abstract "public" that is anyone who uses Google and Google Image Search. We might also be more comfortable with it if we can untag ourselves. Also, people tagging us makes us more likely to be fully aware of the photo option and more likely to share our own photos (Google has an edge over Facebook because you can geotag photos and display them on Google Maps. People will also be able to use these pictures in Gmail which can be very helpful).

People tagging in Facebook. Screenshot licensed as Creative Commons.

A Picasa Albums quota that increases as your items are viewed more. So if you share photos with friends who actually view them and download them or comment on them, you get more storage space. If you add photos from your vacation that are viewed in the Picasa layer on Google Maps then you get more space, etc. So people who use it for personal storage stay at 1GB while people who use it to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible (;-)) get more space to continue doing it. It will be like people whose invites signed up got more invites to use when Gmail was in private beta. People will also probably be excited about the auto-space upgrades (maybe even send them a little email) and become obsessed with having as large a storage limit as possible and so they will begin to add more and more popular items. This will feed into itself.

It would be really nice to have text messages saved to my Gmail like Google Talk chats. I always wonder sometimes what I told someone and I hate having to delete sweet texts because I don't have space.

Integration of Google Docs and Picasa Web Albums into Gmail to allow the searching and sending of files directly from Gmail as attachments or otherwise. This will increase the ease of collaboration and other use of Google Documents that are sent and edited often. This will also help build a community around Picasa.

Add Google Profiles to Google Contact Manager so people can change the information listed for them. Also make it layered like in Orkut based on how close I am to someone (close friend, business associate, etc.). Consolidate my identity with my friends so I only show up once on their chat list whether I'm on GChat or AIM. They can also list my other screen names, location, birthday and status based on my calendar settings (busy v. available), etc. etc. but only in layers depending on how close I am to a contact. Allow me to list my spouse and have a link to their account/profile like in Facebook. Allow me to see if I have friends in common with my other contacts, etc. Give Google the social element that no other sight can have. Plaxo Pulse is hot but Google has interesting products that can make it even better than what Plaxo can offer.

Google's unified profiles, available in Google Maps and Google Reader.

Add a Google Site to everyone's Google Profile like a Facebook or MySpace page. It will have to have aspects (like photos, location, etc.) that can be made restricted based on friendship status. This is one of the reasons people share so much on Facebook. They feel that they better know the people who are the audience of their material. I don't want everyone in the world to see my daughter's baby photos. It will have several pages to it just like a regular website (not just a one-sided, slim webpage like Facebook and MySpace) and will be linked up to other Google services. Instead of fighting to get new users, Google can create heavy users out of its current loyal users. Like with many businesses, it is often wise to increase total sales by catering to repeat customers to tap into a steady source of longterm users who give regular feedback, are pioneer early adopters of technology, and who can help fine tune several types of products.

Integrate my other services into the Google Site so you can have a natural transition from this page to my profile (one of the pages on my site) and see maps and reviews I've written, a list of common friends' profiles and shared Google Reader subscriptions with recently shared posts (a page on my site), my library from Google Books (and Google Scholar) and books we have in common, my blog(s) (a page on my site), my photos and photos and videos I've been tagged in (a page on my site), upcoming events on my calendar that I want to share on my site for other people to add to their calendars.

Picasa Web Albums can be transformed into an art room looking page with paintings, photographs, cool frames, etc. as the background theme. There can be pictures with slideshows, comments, geotag/Google Maps info, etc. Either way, this can be people's creative design for showing off their pictures on a web page that is more unique and dynamic than the simply MySpace or Facebook pages that say "I have pictures. Here." You can display the most commented, shared, favorited, etc. pictures that we've uploaded.

An exhibit of Andrew Wyeth's art. Photo licensed as Creative Commons.

It would be great to have GrandCentral integration with Google Calendar. I can set certain settings that make a meeting send all calls to my work number so my assistant can take the call, write down what's important, etc. If I have nothing listed it can go to my cell depending on the number. It will make Calendar more useful (people will want to make sure they have all their events on their calendar and that their calendar's are up to date and once they are they will want to share it more (like with receptionist that maybe keeps it up or partner to coordinate schedules, etc.)) and more popular. It will also make people want phones with Google Calendar on them so they can change a little event (push it back 15 minutes) whenever necessary so their life is completely organized. People with Blackberries do it already all the time. It would also be really nice to be able to "Ignore with text" automatically. If I'm in a meeting, it can reply "I'm sorry I can't take your call right now. I'm in a meeting which I expect to end at 5:00 PM EST" or "I'm unavailable. I am available in approximately 2 Hours and 43 Minutes at 5:00PM EST" or something like that. Phone companies love giving an excuse to send texts and we would love for each time someone called me for it to tell them I'm busy and not to waste their time calling back in 15 minutes.

Sharing advertisements. I have often seen something that is somewhat related to me but not exactly what I need. It might, however, be exactly what my brother, dad, best friend, etc. were saying they were looking for. This might be an ad for a job (I'm sure my parents would love to send my brother a few of these his way when they come across them), or deals on a vacation getaway package, personal tutors, nail fungus remover, etc. If we could have an option to access your contacts and send them a recommended advertisement, we can tap into the "word of mouth" way that people have been selling things for years. Instead of judging a site by its content or tracking people's movement across several webpages (which people think is very creepy) we can allow people to be the judge of what others will like to see (this will also encourage people to pay more attention to ads even if not for themselves) based on how much better they know that person than Google ever could (or should). We might wanna try pay-per-action ads first since people might be more likely to click on an ad because its funny or send/share it as a prank instead of as a legitimate lead and pay-per-action can help flush out people being silly from people making purchases or signing up for services. Also, people tend to hate ads generally speaking but they are likely to be much more receptive to them when it comes with a friend's recommendation (like a word-of-mouth purchase which people tend to feel much more comfortable making than going on the advertisement alone or from a salesperson/solicitation). People will be more attentive to ads that catch their eye for sales and other events that if their friends saw it and didn't pass the information along they would be upset (i.e. Friend: I saw an ad the other day for exactly what you're talking about and I think it was cheaper. You: Well why did you send it to me or something? You knew before that I would've been interested in that!).

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Share Almost Any Blog Post in Google Reader

Google Reader's sharing feature is very cool, but it's limited to your subscriptions. If you find an interesting post and you want to share it with your friends without subscribing to the feed, Google Reader is not very helpful. On a closer look, you'll notice that Google Reader lets you preview any feed without subscribing to it if you go to this page:

http://www.google.com/reader/view/feed/FEED_URL

But it's not that easy to find the feed and build that URL every time you want to share a post. And even if you do that, you'll still have to find the post.

So I created a bookmarklet that automates the process: it finds the feed and creates a different URL that tells Google Reader to search for the page's title in that feed. Hopefully, the first result is the page you want to share.

Here's how to add the bookmarklet to your browser (because of a Google Reader bug, this doesn't work in Opera and Safari):

1. Make sure the link toolbar is visible in your browser. You can enable it if you go to the View menu in your browser, click on Toolbars and check:
* Bookmarks Toolbar in Firefox
* Links in Internet Explorer

2. Don't click on the link below! For Firefox, right-click on the link, select "Bookmark this Link" and choose "Bookmarks Toolbar" from the dropdown. For Internet Explorer, right-click on the link, select "Add to Favorites", ignore the security warning and choose "Links" from the list of folders.

Share in Google Reader

Note that you'll be able to share pages only from sites that have feeds and only if you go to the blog post, not to the blog's homepage. If the post is very recent, it's likely that Google Reader didn't index it yet. If the page's title is not identical to the post's title, select the title before clicking on the bookmarklet.




Credits: the bookmarklet contains code from Google Reader's subscription bookmarklet; based on a idea by Louis Gray.

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Google Apartment View

In which two young men discover that Google Maps tests an on-demand street view feature, but it's not yet ready for launch. A video from The Vacationeers, "a stylized comedic film group that features Todd Berger, Kevin Brennan, Jeff Grace and Blaise Miller".


{ via Jess Lee }

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Google Docs in Firefox Sidebar

Google Docs Bar (gDocsBar) is a Firefox extension that shows the list of documents from Google Docs in the sidebar. The extension has many features from Google's file explorer: you can search for a file, restrict the list to documents, spreadsheets or presentations and view a certain folder (the subfolders aren't yet supported).

A great feature that makes this extension more valuable is uploading files using drag and drop. Drag one or more files from Windows Explorer to the sidebar and they'll be uploaded in the background.

For those who are worried about security, the extension sends your credentials directly to Google and stores them in Firefox's password manager. After installing the extension, you can make the sidebar visible by going to View > Sidebar > Google Docs Bar. The sidebar will always show the list of documents and it's useful if you frequently use Google Docs.


Related:
Google sidebars for Firefox and Opera
Google Maps in your sidebar (Firefox extension)

{ via Firefox Facts }

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Google Shows More Results in the Local OneBox

When you search for something like [italian restaurant ny], the local search results are more useful than the web results, so Google displays a OneBox that includes these results at the top of the page or in other position. Google has recently increased the number of results displayed in the local OneBox from 3 to 10.


Last year, in January, the OneBox was enriched with a static map, information about reviews, directions. To make room for 10 results instead of 3, Google removed the addresses, the links to directions and the ratings.


It's very interesting to see that the other general search engines (Yahoo, Live Search, Ask.com) link to pages from their local search engines, while Google links to the homepage of each business. Another difference is that Google's box has a variable position, depending on the relevance to user's query.


Search Engine Land asked Google why it decided to increase the number of results. The reason is that "many people didn't realize there was additional local content available beyond the three listings, despite the more results... prompt. Accordingly, Google said that with the 10 links it is hoping to signal people that there is much more local content a click away. The ranking of those ten results is based on a range of factors, including the query, proximity, availability of ratings/reviews and their quality and several other variables."

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Completely Uninstalling Windows Applications

When you uninstall a Windows application, the uninstaller doesn't remove all the files and registry entries created by the application. Sometimes the developers were too lazy or they thought those files might be needed if you reinstall the application. The end result is that your computer loads slower because your registry contains more entries and the hard drive stores unnecessary files.

Revo Uninstaller is a software that lets you completely uninstall programs and it's easier to use than the built-in "Add or remove programs". You can search for a program or locate it in a more intuitive way: enter in the Hunter Mode, open the program you want to uninstall and drag the target to your program's window.


After finding the program, Revo Uninstaller analyzes the program's data, launches the uninstaller and shows you a list of leftovers (files, folders, registry entries related to the application). The application does a pretty good job at identifying them, but you should still check the results before selecting everything. "Even if you have a broken installation, Revo Uninstaller scans for an application's data on your hard disk drives and in the Windows registry and shows all found files, folders and registry items so you can delete them."


Revo Uninstaller also includes a junk files cleaner and a way to remove the history from browsers, Microsoft Office and some Windows application, but CCleaner is a better application for this.

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Invite Collaborators to Multiple Documents

If you have a lot of documents in Google Docs and you need to collaborate with the same people on all of them, it's pretty tedious to open each document, go to the Share tab, enter the email addresses and choose the right settings. Now you don't have to do this anymore, because there's a new button in the file manager that lets you invite people to collaborate on more than a single document: it's called "Share".

It would be nice to automatically add a certain group of people as collaborators for all the documents from a folder, but that's not currently possible.


{ via Google Docs Blog }

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Google Reader Shows the Published Date

Besides a new favicon and a confirmation dialog displayed when you mark all the posts as read, Google Reader now shows the published date of a post in a tooltip. Next to the snippet, Google Reader displays the date when the post was indexed by Google, not the date when it was published. Sometimes the difference between these two dates can be a single minute, but it could also be much bigger.


Google Reader also added some new keyboard shortcuts: a to add subscriptions, g+d to open the feed directory, e to email the current item. You can see the list of keyboard shortcuts by typing ? in Google Reader.

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Save Google Presentations as PDF Files

Google Presently, the poorest member of the Google Docs family, added some new features and they're almost as exciting as the previous update. Now you can finally save your presentation in a decent format: PDF and this is especially useful if you want to print the presentation. To select the number of slides displayed on a page before exporting the presentation, choose the printing option.

Presently also redesigned the rich text editor's toolbar and added a small number of shapes you can insert into your slides: block arrows, circles, bubbles.

While Presently's biggest problem is the poor performance, there are many basic features that are missing: export to PPT, slide master, tables etc.

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Mobile YouTube Application

YouTube updated its mobile site available at m.youtube.com to include all the videos from the desktop version and to provide access to your account, the option to rate videos and post meaningful comments. To use the mobile interface, you need a phone that is able to stream 3GP files over RTSP.

But there's a better way to play YouTube videos from your mobile phone: a Java midlet currently available for some phones from Sony Ericsson (K800, W880) and Nokia (S60 3rd Edition phones: N73, N95, E65, 6110, 6120). The JAR file for Nokia phones can be found here, in case you want to test it on unsupported phones. YouTube's mobile application also lets you upload videos from your phone. To install it, just go to m.youtube.com/app on your phone and follow the steps described in YouTube's help center.

"You may be wondering, Is YouTube for Mobile the same as what's available on the Helio Ocean or Apple iPhone? In a nutshell, yes -- YouTube for Mobile is all about bringing video to mobile phones. We believe in providing the best user experience possible for all users, which in some cases means different YouTube solutions for different phones," explains the YouTube blog.

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Google Docs Uploader

Google released a basic application for Windows that lets you upload files to Google Docs by using drag and drop. The application is more like a sample for Google Docs API, but it's pretty useful if you want to upload a lot of documents. There's also an option to add "Send to Google Docs" to the contextual menu so you can upload files directly from Windows Explorer.

The application can be downloaded from this URL and requires .NET Framework 2.0.



Another way to upload more files at once is to send them to the email address displayed on this page, but this only works with documents and presentations and there are some restrictions regarding the size of the uploaded files: for example, you can send by email only presentations smaller than 500 KB. Google Toolbar for Firefox also has a feature that lets you open files in Google Docs.

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Make about:blank Your Homepage

Many sites try to convince you to set them as your homepage: for example, every time you visit google.com using Internet Explorer, the site prompts you to make Google your homepage (Firefox's default homepage is already a skinned google.com).

Other sites are created just to become your homepage: from classic portals like Yahoo.com to personalized homepages like My Yahoo, iGoogle or Netvibes. But none of the sites is better than about:blank.

According to Wikipedia, "about: is an internal URI scheme (also known as a URL scheme or, erroneously, protocol) in various web browsers to display certain built-in functions and Easter eggs. It is not an officially registered scheme, and has no standard syntax." One of the most common addresses is about:blank, whose only purpose is to display a blank HTML document. It's supported by most browsers and it has a lot of advantages:

* your browser loads much faster
* it works even if you don't have an Internet connection
* it's not distracting so you can continue your work
* you are free to decide where to go, without letting others decide for you
* if you open a new window, some browsers (for example, Internet Explorer) load the homepage
* it's the most minimalist homepage in the world



Fortunately, most browsers have an option to set the blank page as a homepage, but you can always type about:blank to replace the default homepage. And next time when you install a toolbar or any other popular software, keep an eye on settings like "Make Yahoo.com your homepage". By default, most software from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft has the mission to change your homepage and the default search provider.

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Dividing Lines in Google's Navigation Menu

To separate the search and the non-search properties, Google added two dividing lines in the More menu. Another change is that the services are no longer sorted alphabetically, but probably by usage. The order for non-search services is: YouTube, Google Calendar, Picasa Web, Google Docs and Google Reader, while in the search area: Google Video, Google Groups, Book Search, Google Scholar, Google Finance, Blog Search.

It's still difficult to understand why Google doesn't let you customize the navigation bar, the same way you can customize it in the new iPhone interface. This will probably encourage more people to use the menu and to go to their favorite services more often.



{ Thanks, Kevin. }

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Popular Shared Items in Google Reader

The idea of aggregating the posts shared by Google Reader users to create a memetracker somewhere between TechMeme and Digg is not new. Mario Romero created a Facebook app called Feedheads that shows the most popular items shared by your friends, your groups and by all those who use the application.

ReadBurner doesn't focus on aggregating shared items from your friends and it's not restricted to Facebook: the application gets data from any shared items page. "In order to filter out the best stuff ReadBurner counts whenever an item is shared by multiple persons. Since Google Reader users can generally be described as very tech-aware, I think that over time lots of good stuff can come out of ReadBurner," explains the author of this project, Alexander Marktl. For now, most of the popular items are related to technology and a post can get at the top of the list if 20-30 people share it.


Louis Gray, who found this site in the referrer logs, thinks "there is a market for people looking for most popular shared items, and finding new people sharing what they read on Google Reader." It's not clear why Google Reader doesn't experiment with this idea, at least by de-duplicating the reading list and showing only once the posts shared by more people.

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Making Google Reader More Like Gmail

Google Reader could add a lot of features from Gmail that would improve the way it organizes information.

A filtering mechanism would allow you to automatically star, share, email, label or mark as read the posts that match a certain pattern. For example, you could receive an email for each post that contains GDrive in the title or automatically label as Apple all the posts that contain one of the keywords: iPod, iPhone, Mac, iMac, iTunes, Steve Jobs etc.

Conversations are a great way to group related messages and could also be used to cluster posts based on their topic and the backlinks. You'd see the chronology of the articles and read all the posts about a certain subject successively.

Colored labels should make it easier to identify related conversations, especially if you read them in a combined view.

To reply to a post, select a fragment and send it to Google Notebook, Blogger or another blogging platform. To forward a post, send it as an email, an instant message in Gmail Chat.

Create an inbox-like view that doesn't include all the incoming posts: only those that weren't automatically classified and archived using filters.

Mute annoying conversations: a post gets a lot of replies, but you don't think it's interesting. A special option would automatically archive all the future posts from that thread.

If you don't like the web interface, an API should allow those who develop desktop feed readers to implement synchronization with Google Reader.

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Editors for Creating iGoogle Themes

igThemer is a simple way to create iGoogle themes. This week, Google released an API for creating themes, but if you don't want to read the documentation and create the theme files, igThemer lets you select the colors and the necessary images, while previewing the theme on the same page.

igThemer doesn't let you create themes with multiple scenes, but it hosts your theme so you can share it with your friends or submit it to iGoogle's directory. Regardless of the way you create a theme, an easy way to preview it is to use this URL:

http://www.google.com/ig?skin=SKIN_URL
(replace SKIN_URL with the location of your theme's XML file)



An even cooler solution lets you edit the theme directly in iGoogle and see the changes in real-time. Just go to iGoogle, copy the code below and paste it in the address bar (you could also bookmark the script):

javascript:var s=document.createElement('script');s.id="igteid"; s.type="text/javascript";s.src= "http://igoogle-theme-editor.googlecode.com/svn/" +"trunk/iGoogleThemeEditor/dist/ige.js?lang=en&" +new Date().getTime(); document.body.appendChild(s);void(0);


{ The first screenshot is based on the photo Colourful life, licensed as Creative Commons by BlueSunFlower. }

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Associate Email Addresses with a Google Account

Alternate email addresses are useful if you forget the password of your Google Account and now you can add more than one. In your account, click on Edit next to "Personal information" and associate additional email addresses with your Google Account. Note that you can't add email addresses already associated with another Google Account or Gmail addresses.

After you associate an email address with your account, Google sends a confirmation message to authenticate that the address is actually yours. An added benefit is that your other email addresses are connected to your account and Google can use this information: for example, Google Calendar shows you the invitations sent to any of the associated email addresses. You can also log in by using any of the additional email addresses.


{ Thanks, Anonymous. }

Related:
Alternate Google usernames

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AOL Tests Jabber Gateway

Florian Jensen blogged about an AOL test server that lets you connect to AIM and ICQ accounts using XMPP, an open protocol also used by Google Talk. This tutorial shows how to connect using a client that supports XMPP, but you shouldn't expect too much from an experimental project.

Edwin Aoki from AOL confirmed the news: "We've been working really hard over the past few years in making all of our services more open and standards based, working with the SIP as well as the Jabber/XMPP communities. Our XMPP gateway at xmpp.oscar.aol.com, which we've been working on for a while now, is just one approach we're tinkering with. (...) This particular server at xmpp.oscar.aol.com is a test server, so I wouldn't count on it being reliable or even continuously available until we put some more work into it to bring it up to our standards. In the meantime, keep your eyes open for more announcements from us soon."

Justin Uberti, a former AOL employee who now works for Google, is hopeful about the future. "Right now you can only connect to the AIM/ICQ network using this gateway, there is no XMPP Federation. This means that you cannot talk to users on any other IM network at this time, including Google Talk. Hopefully AOL will add support for XMPP Federation in the near future."

For now, Gmail lets you chat with your contacts from AIM or ICQ, but you still need accounts on those networks.

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Blogger Becomes an OpenID Provider

After allowing you to authenticate your comments using an OpenID, Blogger is now an OpenID provider. To use any of your blogs as an OpenID identity, you need to check "Enable OpenID for blogs" in your Blogger profile (the feature is still experimental, so it's not added in the public release yet) and save the settings.


Blogger inserts this line in the head section of your template:

<link rel="openid.server" href="http://draft.blogger.com/openid-server.g" />

so now you can use any of your blogs as an OpenID. Some simple things you can do with your OpenID are to claim your blog at Technorati (you still need a Technorati account), sign in using your OpenID at Plaxo, Zoomr or post comments in a LiveJournal blog, like Brad Fitzpatrick's blog. A small inconvenience is that Blogger uses the subdomain of your blog instead of your name.

Yesterday, Yahoo announced it will support OpenID 2.0 (Blogger is a provider for OpenID 1.1), so the future is bright for this authentication system.

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