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November 21 2009
This week in search 11/20/09
This week brought a number of new features to the fore.
Google Translate
The biggest and most visible release this week was our update to Google Translate. New changes to the interface help you translate instantly and see translations as you type. We have also introduced both input and output transliteration: for selected languages, our tool will show you letter by letter how a word or phrase appears in a different language as you type. We have also added text-to-speech, so you can figure out how to pronounce new words as you learn them.
Rich snippets in Japanese
On the topic of international launches, at our Searchology event in May we announced the launch of rich snippets, which webmasters can use to help Google show more useful information from the page. For example, if you are thinking of trying out a new restaurant and are searching for reviews, rich snippets could include things like the average review score, the number of reviews, and the restaurant's price range. Starting this week, this feature is available in Japanese.
Flu shot finder now on results pages
Following in the footsteps of last week's launch, we have now added our flu shot finder to the search results page.
Example searches: flu shot, h1n1 shot, flu vaccine
Site hierarchies in search results
Google usually shows a green web address, or URL, at the bottom of each search result to let you know where you're headed. Tuesday we began rolling out an improvement that replaces the URL in some search results with a hierarchy showing the precise location of the page on the website. The new display offers valuable context and new navigation options. For example, on the eHow.com result below, you can see that this page is in the Martial Art Techniques section.
Example searches: venn diagram, how to punch harder, hodgkins lymphoma, keurigHope you enjoyed this week's new features. Stay tuned for more!
November 20 2009
Maybe Google Should Give Up The Google Book Search Ghost
Google Book Search is more than a massive undertaking to organize the world's books online and make them available to users.
It's become a epic struggle aficionados of Star Wars can appreciate. From a legal front, this quest stretches back five years, which for many of us who have watched not only Google but the rest of the Internet Wild West burgeon seems like it's long ago, in a galaxy far, far away.
One week after Google, authors and publishers submitted their revised proposal, New York District Court Judge Denny Chin granted preliminary approval to the class-action settlement.
Google was pleased:
The preliminary approval order sends a positive initial message; this agreement promises to benefit readers and researchers, and enhance the ability of authors and publishers to distribute their content in digital form. We remain hopeful that the agreement will receive final approval from the court and will realize the goal of significantly expanding online access to works through Google Book Search, an ambitious effort to make millions of books searchable via the Web.
The Open Book Alliance, led by Internet Archive's Peter Brantley and the lethal Microsoft antitrust legal eagle Gary Reback (with Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo as supporting cast), dismissed Chin's approval as par for the course:
This is not a surprising development and is not any indication that the court will or will not accept the terms of Settlement 2.0. The same procedural preliminary approval was given to Settlement 1.0, and now sets up a court process that will allow those opposed to the revised settlement to let their objections known to the court.
Settlement 1.0 was filed in October 2008 to organize the world's out-of-print books and sell access to them online. Settlement 2.0 has been reworked to limit Google Book Search to include works registered with the U.S. Copyright Office or published in the United Kingdom, Australia or Canada.
The amended settlement also requires the Book Rights Registry--the group appointed to distribute digital book sales to Google, authors and publishers--to have a court-approved trustee to represent rights holders for orphaned works and license their works to third parties.
Chin also set a date for the final hearing on the parties' settlement proposal: Feb. 18, 2010. Opponents and proponents of the deal will be able to file notices with the court between Dec. 14 of this year and Jan. 28.
The U.S. Department of Justice, which urged Chin to reject the settlement because it would violate class action, copyright and antitrust law, has until February 4 to discuss the deal with the court.
My view is the DOJ will disapprove of this revision, too, which would likely alter Chin's view.
While Google, authors and publishers made many changes and concessions, early reports are that they don't seem to have adequately addressed the DOJ's concerns that the deal will give Google too much control over orphaned works -- even though Google has offered to let rivals take them from Google's repository and resell them.
If the DOJ requests more changes, they would likely be of the sort that would be unsatisfactory to Google, which has its own stubborn ideas of how to do things. Larry and Sergey are right; anyone who disagrees is wrong.
Frankly, the OBA won't be happy until Google goes away. The group doesn't want Google presiding over the world's books by itself.
They'd rather wait for some non-partisan group to preside over such an undertaking. The Internet Archive has been toiling away at this, but hasn't gotten as far as Google, which has indexed something like 12 million books to date.
Read what third-party pundits are saying about the revised Google Book Search deal here.
So much scorn for Google, and it can only end badly if Google continues along this course.
With each court proceeding, the rhetoric will be ratcheted up; the idea that Google is a benevolent search engine trying to organize the world's information online will continue to morph into the notion that Google is a greedy Microsoftian-like company that wants to control the world's data.
At one point does the company just say enough is enough, we've got to worry about getting Chrome Operating System to the market next year?
Google Apps highlights – 11/20/2009
Over the last two weeks, we've made improvements across Google Apps, some geared for individuals, others meant for business customers.
Green Robot icon in Gmail Labs
The green, orange and red chat bubbles in Gmail signal if your contacts are online, idle or unavailable, but as more people sign in from mobile devices, it's becoming harder to tell when someone is actually online at a computer or just connected with their phone. The Green Robot feature in Gmail Labs helps you spot when you might want to tailor your exchanges with more succinct messages for people who are signed in with Android-powered devices. Look for the green beaker icon at the top of Gmail to enable Green Robot and other Labs features.
Site templates
On Tuesday we launched templates for Google Sites. The templates gallery is filled with useful example sites ranging from wedding websites to corporate intranets, which you can copy and customize so they're just right. This lets you create a useful, visually appealing collaborative workspace in seconds. And if you have a great site other people would find useful, you can submit it to the gallery. If your business uses Google Sites, templates you submit stay private within your company.
More overflow storage for less
If you're using Google Apps to store photos and manage large volumes of personal email, you'll be happy to hear we're now offering more extra storage for less. Our new overflow storage plans start at $5 per year for 20 GB. For the most avid shutterbugs, the 16 TB plan is enough space for roughly 8 million high resolution pictures!
Improvements to Sync for Outlook
Last week, we released an update to Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook, our tool that lets companies stop running Microsoft Exchange while still letting some employees use the familiar Outlook interface. Now, employees can sync multiple calendars between Outlook and Google Apps, and look up free/busy information from Exchange for co-workers who haven't migrated to Google Apps yet.
Google Apps Premier Edition innovation – Year in review
Businesses using Google Apps not only save money compared to running their own email systems, but also their employees get access to innovation at a much faster pace than with conventional business technologies. We've launched over 100 improvements to Google Apps in the last year, and on Thursday I hosted a webcast to recap noteworthy recent updates for businesses, including push email, contacts and calendar support for BlackBerry, iPhone, Windows Mobile and Android, Sync for Microsoft Outlook, offline access and more. If you missed the webcast, you can watch it on YouTube.
Who's gone Google?
This week I'm pleased to welcome a new crop of companies, schools and public agencies that have recently switched to Google Apps, including Delta Hotels, Michigan State University, the City of Orlando and the Office of the New Mexico Attorney General. The Motorola Mobile Devices Division deployed Google Apps to its employees this week, and the Los Angeles City Council recently voted unanimously to move 30,000 city employees to Google Apps.
We hope these updates help you get even more from Google Apps. For details and the latest news in this area, check out the Google Apps Blog.
Sketchup 7.1 bug fixes and lifelike facades
To go along with the nice imagery update yesterday, Google has done a few things to help improve the 3D models found in Google Earth
Update to SketchUp 7.1: This update consists entirely of bug fixes, with no new features present. It fixes some measurement and precision errors, among other things. Here are the full release notes if you're interested. SketchUp 7.1 added a lot of great features, so this update should make modelers very happy.
3D models with detailed facades: Using StreetView imagery, in a way similar to what you can do in SketchUp 7.1, Google has added high-res facades to buildings in five California cities: Los Angeles, San Diego, San Franciso, Berkeley and Stockton. By using StreetView imagery to detail the 3D models, zoomed in areas of the downtown streets look stunning. Here's a quick video showing some of these new buildings:.
I'd expect we'll see this technology find its way over to Building Maker eventually. Having that kind of imagery available in Building Maker would allow them to expand the available area for it much more rapidly.
In the meantime, enjoy the sharp looking cities in California. They're quite stunning and becoming more realistic all the time.
Google to Test New, More Colorful (and Permanent) Sidebar
Google is rolling out a design prototype to some users which will have a permanent new pane to the left hand side. Within that pane, as the screenshot by Search Engine Land (with more coverage) shows, there will be sections such as “Everything”, “Images”, or “Video”, as well as related search queries and more fine-tuning options. Clicking “Images” switches to what Google internally calls the images “mode”, meaning the results will now consist of images. “By default, Google guesses at the modes it thinks are most relevant to your search,” Danny Sullivan explains. The top bar of the prototype still contains navigation links like images and video, too, causing a bit of redundancy.
I also got hold of a sprites image that looks like it’s used for this prototype (a sprite image is referenced by a stylesheet, and quicker to transmit because it only needs to be downloaded once, and can then be cropped as needed for different icons on the client side). Have a look, you can see the new Google results page logo and some of the pane icons, among other things:
If Google doesn’t switch its place, this image is hosted at
google.com/images/srpr/nav_logo3w.png
Here’s another one (going by the number 5; a number 4 is available too):
If this is ever rolled out for everyone – right now, around 1 - 3% are going to see it, Search Engine Land says – it’s going to be a pretty major design step. Right now, the left hand pane still needs to be manually expanded, which probably means many people ignore it. I guess the question for the new harder-to-ignore pane will be whether it’ll start to get in your way or not. For many queries, we may just be looking for the best website out there, or a quick bit of textual information; for other queries, we may well like to have richer results. Right now, Google already automatically sometimes shows richer results and sometimes more text based ones – the “universal search” approach, though Google’s Marissa Mayer finds it can cause unexpected “Jazz" style result design that slows searchers down. I guess for the new constant sidebar there’s both the chance that it causes more organization, or more clutter. If any of you stumbles upon this prototype, please let me know via email of the contents of the Google.com cookie named PREF so we can reproduce the test and have a try ourselves!
[Thanks Ionut! Image CC-licensed by Search Engine Land.]
[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google to Test New, More Colorful (and Perman ... | Comments]
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Google Chrome OS is an open source operating system for people who spend most of their time on the web built around the core tenets of speed, simplicity and security. www.chromium.org |
From:
Google
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| Time: 01:19:49 | More in Science & Technology |
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A Preview of Google Chrome OS
Google has released Chromium OS*, the open source precursor to their Chrome OS (which Google says will be “ready for users” in a year). Google in a blog post explains that the Chrome operating system will be all about web apps, not traditional apps, so the “entire experience” takes place within the browser. Additional focus in Chrome OS will be on speed, as well as security; “Every time you restart your computer the operating system verifies the integrity of its code,” Google promises. They also mention that they “benefited hugely from projects like GNU, the Linux Kernel, Moblin, Ubuntu, WebKit”, some of the layers of Chrome OS.
Below video is giving an overview of the Chrome OS user interface:
[Thanks Fabio, Ricardo, Inferno, everyone!]
*I was not able to reach that site at the moment.
[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: A Preview of Google Chrome OS | Comments]
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More new imagery in Google Earth
It's only been a couple of weeks since their last update, but Google has just pushed out more new imagery for Google Earth.
Some of the areas that have been updated are various locations in the United States (including Florida and California), a few locations in Brazil, northern India, northern New Zealand and a variety of other locations around the world.
You can see the new locations using this KML file
, or view them here in Google Maps.
Share your finds: As with previous updates, they're encouraging you to Tweet about interesting things that you find in the new imagery using the #GEarthIMG hashtag. You could also drop a link to your interesting discoveries in our comments, or submit them to the database over at Google Earth Hacks.
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YouTube Audio Transcription
The feature only works for English and it's been enabled for a small number of channels that usually feature talks and interviews: UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Yale, UCLA, Duke,UCTV, Columbia, PBS, National Geographic.
Another new feature is auto-timing, which lets you upload the transcription of a video and it automatically generates the time codes. "All you need to do is create a simple text file with all the words in the video and we'll use Google's ASR technology to figure out when the words are spoken and create captions for your video."
Since Google's speech recognition technology is not perfect, it would be useful to generate the captions and then to manually edit them to correct the mistakes.
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November 19 2009
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Marissa Mayer and Food Network's Alton Brown celebrate Thanksgiving with new themes and gadgets for igoogle. google.com |
From:
Google
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| Time: 01:04:33 | More in Entertainment |
Cool. Even Batman uses Google.
So when we got together with the search team to brainstorm ways to talk about our latest innovations (like music in search results), we decided to feature them through stories inspired by our users. Because while we're proud of the innovations we're making in search, we're proudest of the things people use search to accomplish. In other words, the best search results don't show up on a webpage — they show up in somebody's life.
So in that spirit, we made a bunch of videos. There's one about grandma dipping her toe into technology. One about friends taking a Kerouac inspired road trip. And yes, there's even one about Bruce Wayne.
Here's the first one:
You can see them all here.
As they say in the movies, all the characters in these videos are fictional, any resemblance to persons alive or dead are purely coincidental.
We hope you enjoy them.
Google Video Explains What Chrome OS Is
Google Nov. 19 made developers happy by releasing Chrome Operating System to open source.
Chrome OS is a Web operating system intended as an alternative to Microsoft Windows, allowing users to run Web apps much faster. Google intends to use Chrome OS to power netbooks, those light, speedy machines, from Sony and other providers.
Caesar Sengupta, Chrome OS Group Product Manager and Matt Papakipos, Engineering Director for Chrome OS, noted:
All apps are Web apps. The entire experience takes place within the browser and there are no conventional desktop applications. This means users do not have to deal with installing, managing and updating programs.
Google officials, including Papakipos and Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management, announced the news at an event at Google's Mountain View headquarters.
Programmers can find links to the source code on Chromium, as well as design documents and videos walking them through the booting procedure, security and other aspects of the OS here.
However, Pichai noted that Chrome OS is still more than a year away from appearing in netbooks. Papakipos explained in a blog post:
We are doing this early, a year before Google Chrome OS will be ready for users, because we are eager to engage with partners, the open source community and developers. As with the Google Chrome browser, development will be done in the open from this point on. This means the code is free, accessible to anyone and open for contributions.
And for the lay user who has no idea what Chrome OS is all about, Google has a top level view of what the Web operating system is all about here:
That's the gist of the news. I will have more on the actual event in a story for eWEEK later this afternoon.
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Google Chrome OS Event
Meanwhile, the source code for Chrome OS is already available. Here's the login screen:
... and one of the wallpapers that are included:
Chrome OS is a lightweight Linux distribution based on Debian that uses a lot of open-source software: Host AP Linux drivers, PAM (an authentication mechanism), Syslinux (a lightweight bootloader), IBus (Intelligent Input Bus for Linux / Unix OS), ConnMan (Internet connection manager), XScreenSaver and other software. More on this later.
Other sites live blogging the event:
* Gizmodo
* Matt Cutts
Live blogging:
- Chrome OS launches next year
Chrome, the foundation of Chrome OS
- Chrome has 40 million users
- Chrome focuses on: speed, security, simplicity
- new stuff: Chrome for Mac/Linux and extensions
HTML5: making the web more powerful
- powerful web apps
- web apps should use threads
- offline web apps
Converging trends
- netbooks have an explosive growth
- millions of users are living in the cloud
Chrome OS:
- instant boot
- Chrome on Chrome OS is faster
- every app is a web app
- all data is in the cloud
- browser security model
Demo:
- 7 seconds boot time
- the UI is a work in progress
- easy to access favorite apps
- app menu
- panels: persistent lightweight windows (example: Google Talk)
- file browser
- local files open in web apps (including Microsoft Office online apps)
- native video player
Under the hood:
- design documents
- no hard disks, only solid-state drives
- verified boot
- security: the OS does not trust any app
- read-only root file system
- user data synced to the cloud
- automatic updates for the entire OS
Market:
- reference hardware
- you can't download Chrome OS and install it on your machine
- the only way to install the OS is to buy a Chrome OS machine
- the target launch time: the end of next year
What is Google Chrome OS?
- the web browser is the most important program on your computer
- your browser is your operating system
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Releasing the Chromium OS open source project
Today we are open-sourcing the project as Chromium OS. We are doing this early, a year before Google Chrome OS will be ready for users, because we are eager to engage with partners, the open source community and developers. As with the Google Chrome browser, development will be done in the open from this point on. This means the code is free, accessible to anyone and open for contributions. The Chromium OS project includes our current code base, user interface experiments and some initial designs for ongoing development. This is the initial sketch and we will color it in over the course of the next year.
We want to take this opportunity to explain why we're excited about the project and how it is a fundamentally different model of computing.
First, it's all about the web. All apps are web apps. The entire experience takes place within the browser and there are no conventional desktop applications. This means users do not have to deal with installing, managing and updating programs.
Second, because all apps live within the browser, there are significant benefits to security. Unlike traditional operating systems, Chrome OS doesn't trust the applications you run. Each app is contained within a security sandbox making it harder for malware and viruses to infect your computer. Furthermore, Chrome OS barely trusts itself. Every time you restart your computer the operating system verifies the integrity of its code. If your system has been compromised, it is designed to fix itself with a reboot. While no computer can be made completely secure, we're going to make life much harder (and less profitable) for the bad guys. If you dig security, read the Chrome OS Security Overview or watch the video.
Most of all, we are obsessed with speed. We are taking out every unnecessary process, optimizing many operations and running everything possible in parallel. This means you can go from turning on the computer to surfing the web in a few seconds. Our obsession with speed goes all the way down to the metal. We are specifying reference hardware components to create the fastest experience for Google Chrome OS.
There is still a lot of work to do, and we're excited to work with the open source community. We have benefited hugely from projects like GNU, the Linux Kernel, Moblin, Ubuntu, WebKit and many more. We will be contributing our code upstream and engaging closely with these and other open source efforts.
Google Chrome OS will be ready for consumers this time next year. Sign up here for updates or if you like building your operating system from source, get involved at chromium.org.
Lastly, here is a short video that explains why we're so excited about Google Chrome OS.
Automatic captions in YouTube
Since the original launch of captions in our products, we’ve been happy to see growth in the number of captioned videos on our services, which now number in the hundreds of thousands. This suggests that more and more people are becoming aware of how useful captions can be. As we’ve explained in the past, captions not only help the deaf and hearing impaired, but with machine translation, they also enable people around the world to access video content in any of 51 languages. Captions can also improve search and even enable users to jump to the exact parts of the videos they're looking for.
However, like everything YouTube does, captions face a tremendous challenge of scale. Every minute, 20 hours of video are uploaded. How can we expect every video owner to spend the time and effort necessary to add captions to their videos? Even with all of the captioning support already available on YouTube, the majority of user-generated video content online is still inaccessible to people like me.
To help address this challenge, we've combined Google's automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions, or auto-caps for short. Auto-caps use the same voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice to automatically generate captions for video. The captions will not always be perfect (check out the video below for an amusing example), but even when they're off, they can still be helpful—and the technology will continue to improve with time.
In addition to automatic captions, we’re also launching automatic caption timing, or auto-timing, to make it significantly easier to create captions manually. With auto-timing, you no longer need to have special expertise to create your own captions in YouTube. All you need to do is create a simple text file with all the words in the video and we’ll use Google’s ASR technology to figure out when the words are spoken and create captions for your video. This should significantly lower the barriers for video owners who want to add captions, but who don’t have the time or resources to create professional caption tracks.
To learn more about how to use auto-caps and auto-timing, check out this short video and our help center article:
You should see both features available in English by the end of the week. For our initial launch, auto-caps are only visible on a handful of partner channels (list below*). Because auto-caps are not perfect, we want to make sure we get feedback from both viewers and video owners before we roll them out more broadly. Auto-timing, on the other hand, is rolling out globally for all English-language videos on YouTube. We hope to expand these features for other channels and languages in the future. Please send us your feedback to help make that happen.
Today I'm more hopeful than ever that we'll achieve our long-term goal of making videos universally accessible. Even with its flaws, I see the addition of automatic captioning as a huge step forward.
* Partners for the initial launch of auto-caps: UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Yale, UCLA, Duke, UCTV, Columbia, PBS, National Geographic, Demand Media, UNSW and most Google & YouTube channels.
On the Fight Over Control of the Web
Tim O’Reilly argues that we’re heading for a web war – an ugly fighting over the control of the web, which goes against the web as an interoperable platform:
[W]e’ve grown used to a world with one dominant search engine, one dominant online encyclopedia, one dominant online retailer, one dominant auction site, one dominant online classified site, and we’ve been readying ourselves for one dominant social network.
But what happens when a company with one of these natural monopolies uses it to gain dominance in other, adjacent areas? I’ve been watching with a mixture of admiration and alarm as Google has taken their dominance in search and used it to take control of other, adjacent data-driven applications. I noted this first with speech recognition, but it’s had the biggest business impact so far in location-based services.
A few weeks ago, Google offered free turn-by-turn directions for Android phones. This is awesome news for consumers, who previously could get this only in dedicated GPS devices or with high-priced iPhone apps. But it’s also a sign just how competitive the web is getting, and just how powerful Google is getting, because they understand that “data is the Intel Inside” of the next generation of computer applications.
Nokia paid $8 billion for NavTeq, the leading provider of such turn-by-turn directions. GPS-maker TomTom paid $3.7 billion for TeleAtlas, the #2 provider in the market. Google quietly built an equivalent service, and is now giving it away for free – but only to their own business partners. (...)
Most interestingly, this move sets the stage for the future competition between Google and Apple. (...) Apple controls access to the dominant device of the mobile web; Google controls access to one of the most important mobile applications (...)
[W]e’re facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill.
Admittedly, some of the dominant platforms Tim points out are built on top of sort of democratic crowd wisdom; Google’s result rankings are powered by the specifics of how people around the world prefer to link to one another; Wikipedia is made up of our collective typing; on eBay, we’re selling stuff to each other. In all of these the middle man still has control, but it may not be a classic monopoly – this time around, playing nicely seems to increase your chance of long term survival. Google, for instance, has been playing very nice recently, with lots of open source initiatives, tools to make things more transparent, focus on data export and so on; Wikipedia on the other hand is giving away all content under flexible licensing terms, previously GNU and now Creative Commons.
Or is this just a more subtle way to introduce the platform monopoly of the future? What happens when an API is cancelled, our user accounts get banned, our content gets deleted or not accepted in the first place, or the platform provider decides to ban certain countries from its content, or decides to censor some of its content in some countries? Will we have enough useful competition to switch to, or are we locked in because it just so happens that only one or two players have the resources to create the kind of backends needed for tools working on this immensely fast changing and wide web? Will there only be a few dominating companies, each with a massive user base, and whatever independent developers throw on the web, these companies can copy into their existing tools – because that’s where people already are, crushing competition not because their individual tools are better, but because they’re the host of a few immensely popular and cool tools which manage to carry their other offerings?
[Via Waxy.]
[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: On the Fight Over Control of the Web | Comments]
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Yahoo Search Now Indexing Twitter Tweets for Breaking News
Yahoo Nov. 19 began indexing Twitter tweets, photos, and videos pertaining to breaking news stories on its Yahoo News Shortcut, which is displayed on our the company's search results page when users search for fresh news.
Today, users will see new tabs for Twitter, news, photos and videos, when they search on a topic, such as "Maersk, Alabama." Clicking on the Twitter tab surfaces fresh tweets on the topic:
Or, search for "Space Shuttle Atlantis" and you can see news, photo, video, and Twitter tabs in the news shortcut. Clicking on the Videos tab yielded this:
You can scroll from left to right through the photos and videos tabs, which pull information from Yahoo News.
Yahoo Search engineers Ivan Davtchev and Nitzan Achsaf wrote:
This is our first integration of fresh social content like Twitter into Web search, and we are planning to continue further along these lines. In the future we will enhance this experience with more real-time and exciting content so you can find all the information you need about a news event in one place.
This is a smart, logical move by Yahoo, but it also feels like a me,too shot after Microsoft launched Bing Twitter one month ago. But hey, at least Yahoo beat Google to indexing real-time tweets.
I've already noted how indexing real-time information can help the search engines.
I haven't heard yet if Yahoo's Twitter integration comes courtesy of the alleged real-time pact it inked with OneRiot.
Yahoo needs help. Fast.
As I reported earlier this week, Google and Microsoft's collective gain for October came at the expense of Yahoo, which plummeted to 18 percent in October from the prior month's total of 18.8 percent. That's Yahoo's lowest share ever and its largest month-to-month share decline since August 2008.
I asked Yahoo how planned to avoid being further squeezed by its rivals. A Yahoo spokesperson responded through the lens of the new Twitter tweets:
As of today, the other search providers don't have experiences like the one we are launching. We are the first company to aggregate all that content in one place for our users. Between the unique Y! News content and the "from the field" Twitter info, our users get to experience truly advanced search results -- with relevant and recent news, images and tweets -- when searching about a current or timely topic.
Okay, but it's not like Yahoo will advertise these new features. People aren't suddenly going to leave Google or Bing, which is already indexing Twitter quite nicely, for this feature upgrade.
Now that Yahoo is indexing tweets, albeit for breaking news, will the people come?
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What's cooking with iGoogle...
Since many of us love to celebrate great food, we're excited to announce that we've partnered with a variety of top chefs and food industry experts to bring you some elegant new, food-focused iGoogle themes and gadgets. iGoogle is all about personalization and freshness, and in that spirit, these unique themes are sure to delight the chef in all of us. Be sure to check out our iGoogle gallery, where you'll find some tasty new themes from chefs like Alton Brown and Paula Deen, food artists like Carl Warner and James Parker and even famous bakeries like New York City's Crumbs Bake Shop and Magnolia Bakery.
In addition to these taste bud tantalizing themes, we've also partnered with many top food industry names to build a suite of new gadgets for your iGoogle page. For example, Supercook lets you input various ingredients you have on hand, then gives you some great recipes you can whip up. And if you're feeling like a night out at a new restaurant, Urbanspoon will help you pick a restaurant on the fly — all from your iGoogle page.
We hope this new element of gourmet iGoogle personalization will get you even more interested in enhancing your cooking and dining experiences. Here's to some great new food with family and friends this holiday season!
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Google Earth 5.1 released; no longer considered beta
Google Earth 5.1 has been out for a few months now, and it's been very well-received. It had a slew of bug fixes, some small new features, and some exceptional speed improvements. That's not to say it was perfect.
Over the past few months, Google has been refining it and now they've released an updated version of Google Earth 5.1 and they've removed the "beta" label from it. This update will take you from version 5.1.3509.4636 to 5.1.3533.1731. The Google update tools aren't showing this release yet, so you'll need to download it directly from the Google Earth site.
Google hasn't said a whole lot about the update, other than it has "a few more tweaks and bug fixes". However, for Mac users this update includes the Google Earth plug-in when you install it, much like the Windows version has in recent releases.
The only known bug fix that I'm aware of was from this critter that's been around for a little while. If you were running Windows Vista or 7 with more than four gigs of RAM, 3D buildings would often fail to fully load. I experienced this issue on my new computer, and I'm very happy to report that this update fixes the problem!
Beyond that, I'm sure there were quite a few other small fixes -- have you noticed any in particular?
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Watch this short demo to learn about machine-generated captions in youtube and automatic timing for manually created caption tracks. |
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| Time: 02:35 | More in Science & Technology |
Maybe Soup is currently being updated? I'll try again automatically in a few seconds...
