Google made a deal with China Mobile, world's largest mobile operator, to provide search for its WAP portal. China Mobile has 300 million users (70% share in China's mobile market).

Users are able to search for ringtones, pictures, videos, and online games on China Mobile's Monternet portal. This partnership is important for Google, which is very far behind Baidu.com.

"Mobile phone is a multimedia platform, especially in China, it is embodied by the download of ringtones and pictures. Moreover, Google regards multimedia search as the development trend for mobile search," explains TMCnet. Google invests a lot in mobile technologies and mobile search could be a good way to improve its position in China.

Google Reader added a way to see "personalized trends for your subscriptions and read items". You'll be able to see how many posts you read daily, what are your favorite feeds, the most prolific authors, the most inactive feeds. This is also a great way to decide if you actually read a certain feed or you just keep it in your subscription list because it's too difficult to unsubscribe.


{ Thank you, Jeff G. }

Update: Some people shared their stats: Matt Cutts, Mihai Parparita, and more.

YouTube promised to deliver by the end of 2006 a technology that allows content identification. "The new technology will be designed to scan a digital audio file, such as an MP3 or video, and compare the electronic fingerprints to databases of copyright material."

Financial Times speculates that the delay "could represent a serious obstacle to efforts by Google, its new owner, to forge closer relations with the media and entertainment industry". Content providers want to get a cut from the ads placed next to their videos or next to videos that use their content, so YouTube's content identification system should be up and running before it introduces video ads.

YouTube's success with CBS should make people think. "YouTube users are clearly being entertained by the CBS programming they're watching as evidenced by the sheer number of video views. Professional content seeds YouTube and allows an open dialogue between established media players and a new set of viewers," said Quincy Smith from CBS about their YouTube branded channel.

EverNote is a free application for Windows that lets you create and organize notes. You can enter your own text, copy content from web pages or drag and drop it. For each note, you can assign categories. There are also automatic categories that let you find notes that contain images or notes from an application like Outlook. You can search your notes instantly and access previous versions of a note.

Notes can only be printed or sent by email, as there isn't a way to directly export them to PDF. You can drag and drop notes between EverNote and other applications such as an IM client.

My favorite feature is templates: you have built-in layouts for shopping lists, to-do lists, source code and more.

There's also a paid version with more advanced features like: synchronization with USB drives, search in handwritten notes.

All in all, an elegant application that looks like Windows Media Player (but it has more to offer) and beats the web-based Google Notebook, that is optimized only for web clips.

Yesterday someone asked me how to remove the tabs from the personalized homepage. While there's an easy way to hide the tabs in Firefox, this personalized homepage won't have tabs.

Tabs help you organize your feeds and gadgets, but you may want to have a really personal homepage that you'll never read at work or in an Internet cafe.

Google-Dell start page keeps the old look of Google's personalized homepage, doesn't have tabs and saves all the settings in your Google Account. To add gadgets, find them in this directory, copy the source URL and manually add it to the Dell page.

You can also use Google-Gateway start page or create a page using Google Apps for Your Domain.

Google Cache is a great solution if a web page is down. If you're visiting a site and it returns a 404 error message, you can either do a search on Google for that site (add the cache: operator, so your search query would be something like cache:www.google.com) or you can use this Firefox extension that provides a custom error page.

Google Cache shows a page like it was when Google last crawled it successfully, so it may be outdated. Google doesn't store images, scripts and other embedded objects, but it tries to retrieve them from their original location. If the page is down, most of the external resources won't be accessible and the page will load slowly.



In this case, it's a good idea to click on the "cached text" link to see only the text. You can also add &strip=1 at the end of the URL or install this Greasemonkey script that adds a link to the text version of the cached page in the search results page.

While reading the page, you may find other interesting links from the same site. Instead of repeating the same steps, you can install a Greasemonkey script that adds a new link to the Google Cache version for all the links from that page. This way, you can browse the web from Google Cache.

Oftentimes, pages load much faster from Google Cache and it's easier to spot your keywords as they are highlighted by Google. You'll also bypass access restrictions, so you can use it as a primitive proxy.

hakia is a new search engine that tries to understand more from the web pages and focuses on information rather than web pages. "The basic promise is to bring search results by meaning match - similar to the human brain's cognitive skills - rather than by the mere occurrence (or popularity) of search terms."

For simple queries like [panda] or [Napoleon Bonaparte], hakia shows galleries: a big list of results grouped by topics that try to answer to many possible queries. For Napoleon Bonaparte, you'll see these clusters: official websites, biographies, pictures, news and interviews, fan sites, awards, speeches, myths, controversies, resources, innovations, statistics, bibliography, filmography. So it's like an automatically-generated Wikipedia page, without a coherent story.

Like other search engines, hakia shows snippets for each result, but these snippets are bigger and try to highlight a possible answer to your query. Unfortunately, hakia is not always on the right track and when it fails, it fails completely.

hakia works only for English queries, doesn't recognize spelling errors too often, doesn't have advanced operators and it's a bad choice for navigational queries (the first search result for [google] is google.org).

The search engine will get out of beta this year and its founders predict it will be the first engine to use ontological semantics that enable it "to perceive concepts beyond words and retrieve results with meaningful equivalents".

Sometimes vanity can be a good thing. A Ruby on Rails programmer had the brilliant idea to connect those who need to find an old friend with their old friend, who does a vanity search* on Google. Long Time Lost is a site that creates a page, where you can enter the name of your friend and some details about him/her and your relation. The page will be indexed by Google and other search engines and will hopefully be in the top results for your friend's name.

The concept is very simple and if you don't want to use that site, you can create a page on your own site. Try to keep it simple, and don't forget to place the name in the title and the header.

* vanity search = searching one's own name on an Internet search engine

{ Via Digg. }

[ I really didn't want to write about this, but because many news sites (Slashdot, Digg) already talk about this, it can't bring too much trouble. ]

Do you remember the post about the XML that contained your Gmail contact list? Well, Haochi from Googlified discovered that by adding "out=js" at the end of that URL, you can get the same data in JavaScript format. Even more, if you add "callback=name", you get a JavaScript code that can be used in any web site. This thing has a name: JSON and it's a very practical way of importing data into a JavaScript application. The problem here is that anyone can import your Gmail contact list (if you are logged in) and send it to a server.

The JavaScript file is used by Google to make it easy to send videos to your contacts in Google Video, to invite people in Google Spreadsheets and Google Notebook. So it's not a bug in Gmail, they just exposed some data in a wrong way.

Google can fix this in many ways and will certainly fix it. Until then, it's a good idea to sign out of Gmail when you're not using it.

Update (after a day): Google fixed the security vulnerability.

If you sign out of Gmail, you'll notice that the storage doesn't increase. It used to increase with about 0.33 MB a day, but the Gmail team forgot to add the code that manages the quota increase after 31st December 2006.

On April 1st 2005, Gmail space increased from 1 GB to 2 GB and started to grow every day. They called this: "Infinity+1 storage plan".

"Storage is an important part of email, but that doesn't mean you should have to worry about it. To celebrate our one-year birthday, we're giving everyone one more gigabyte. But why stop the party there? Our plan is to continue growing your storage beyond 2GBs by giving you more space as we are able."

Update (January 3rd): Everything is back to normal. On April 1st 2007 we'll have 2835 MB.