Google Tag Cloud Maker is a Greasemonkey script that aggregates all the words from the titles and snippets of Google search results and creates a box that lists the most frequent words. If you hover over one of the words, you'll see the search results that contain that word in the title or snippet and if you click on the word, it will be added to the current query.

This is a primitive way to refine a query using some information from the search results, but it's also a way to see the big picture, to understand more about your query without visiting each search result.

The idea doesn't work well for all the queries, the popular words are not always placed at the top, and the box also clutters the interface. But it may be useful at times.

To install the script you need Greasemonkey for Firefox. Find more Greasemonkey scripts for Google services at this site.

{ via Lifehacker }

Ask.com has a campaign in the UK called "Information Revolution". Their purpose is to convince the people who use Google to search online that they should use other search engines too. While the message is noble, Ask's arguments are a little out of place. They suggest that Google could control the information and become the Ministry of Truth from Orwell's 1984.

Did you know that more than 75% of people in the UK use just one search engine to find information? The same search engine. The biggest search engine. The most popular search engine. Why? It's not that there aren't choices, it just seems that most people don't use them.

You can imagine we were rather curious about this, so we did some research and found that 62% of Internet users don't think about which search engine they use. We call that sleep searching, you probably call it 'getting stuff online'.

But statistics aside, if this keeps up, who knows what could happen? One company could eventually be your only source of access to information on the Web! Controlling your mind would only be a step away! Then they'll have you. All too easy...

But this is 2007, not 1984. So we're speaking up before things get out of hand. Raging against the machine kind of thing. The machine of conventional wisdom if you like!

It's always a good idea to use more than one source of information, but scaring people away with Orwellian allusions is not a good strategy. Especially when the search engine you advertise has a long way to go before becoming a reliable source of information.

The campaign is also a call to rebellion against the establishment and the layouts and the texts seem to be inspired by Che Guevara, the leader of the Communist Revolution in Cuba.

While many people suggest that Google is actually a monopoly and has become synonymous with search, the cost of switching to other search engines is minimal. Especially when Yahoo and Microsoft ask you if you want to switch to their search engines everytime you visit them. You don't have to download new software, learn how to use it and become comfortable with it (you have to do this if you switch from Windows - Microsoft's monopoly). To change your default search engine is as easy as changing your homepage or the default engine from the search box. But to do that you need to have a reason, to see a search engine that shows much better results than Google for most queries. As long as the alternatives are worse, it's no wonder that people use Google.

Update:
Ask UK shows this "smart answer" when you search for [search]. According to Matt Cutts, the same "smart answer" was displayed when you searched for [Google].


{ The first image is licensed as Creative Commons by montini. }

Google collects a lot of data, but to make sense of it, they need proper tools to mine the data and to visualize the results.

Gapminder, a non-profit organization from Sweeden, wants to "make the data more accessible and easier to use for instant visual analysis." They developed a tool called Trendalyzer "that turns boring (...) statistics into attractive moving graphics" and used it to visualize the United Nations Common Database, that has a lot of information about almost all the countries in the world. The results is Gapminder World.

Googlers found about the organization last year, when Gapminder gave a very interesting presentation at Googleplex. After hosting their visualization tool on Google's servers for almost a year, Google decided to acquire the technology from Gapminder. "Gathering data and creating useful statistics is an arduous job that often goes unrecognized. We hope to provide the resources necessary to bring such work to its deserved wider audience by improving and expanding Trendalyzer and making it freely available to any and all users capable of thinking outside the X and Y axes," says Marissa Mayer.

Gapminder is also excited about this event: "Gapminder and Google share an enthusiasm for technology that makes data easily accessible and understandable to the world. Gapminder's Trendalyzer software unveils the beauty of statistics by converting boring numbers into enjoyable interactive animations. We believe that Google's acquisition of Trendalyzer will speed up the achievement of this noble goal. Trendalyzer's developers have left Gapminder to join Google in Mountain View, where Google intends to improve and scale up Trendalyzer, and make it freely available to those who seek access to statistics."

A better Google Trends, enhanced statistics for all Google services, or maybe a cool integration with Google Earth. How do you think they'll use Trendalyzer?

Note: This tool may conflict with Google's TOS, but I thought it was interesting enough to tell you about it.

Many people would like to have feeds for Google search results. They could use them to monitor some keywords or to develop their web applications. But Google didn't show any interest in providing this feature; moreover, they cut the support for the SOAP API.

In an interesting twist, someone realized that Google actually has a way to return results in an XML file, but you need to do some work to actually retrieve them. So your URL will look the same as the standard URL for a Google search, except that you'll have to add some new parameters:

* ch=[value of a checksum]
* client=navclient-auto

Basically, you'll pretend you're Google Toolbar (that's the explanation for the client parameter) and add a checksum for the query that uses a similar algorithm to the checksum used to find the PageRank value. Unlike the API, you won't have any limitation (although Google might realize you're not Google Toolbar).

The code and some demos are available here.

Homework:
1. How does this code breaches Google's TOS more than screen scraping?
2. Do you know where is this feature used in Google Toolbar?

Google Webmaster Central shows the most popular 100 phrases used by other sites to link to your site. If you go to Statistics / Page analysis, you'll find a list of anchor phrases, obtained by removing punctuations.

Google's algorithms use those keywords to understand a page better. Sometimes a page ranks well for some keywords that are not even contained in that page, but they're used in links from other pages. For example, Yahoo.com is the fourth result for [under 18] mostly because of backlinks that use this anchor text.


"This information is useful, because it helps you know what others think your site is about. How sites link to you has an impact on your traffic from those links, because it describes your site to potential visitors," notes Vanessa Fox.

I was mentioning last month about a presentation tool that might have been developed by Google. Apparently, the application has already been created and now is being tested.

I've just found a blog (screenshot, just in case), used by one of Google's trusted testers*, that describes one of the tests.

1. Log in to writely-testing
2. Open a new presentation
3. Insert text above the slide title
4. Observe the text above the slide title is displayed below in view presentation

The post is very recent (March 13) and gives another clue that Presently will be a part of Writely (now known as Google Docs).

* Here are some snippets from his/her posts. Most of the posts have been removed.

The Spanish Noticias.com quotes Isabel Aguilera, director of Google Spain & Portugal, who says they work on a mobile device that will facilitate access to information in developing countries. Noticias.com doesn't mention other details about the phone, but we can imagine something similar to the One Laptop per Child project.

To make it really easy to find information, the phone should have some speech recognition capabilities, like those used in Google Voice Search, so you wouldn't have to type queries. Google's search interface should also be different and should shift the focus from browsing to retrieving information. Google Maps should be aware about your location. But how to build a cheap phone optimized for Internet applications?

{ via Engadget. }

Google seems to be undecided about the purpose of the navigation links (also known as "corner bookmarks") from Gmail, Google Calendar and other applications. While the only change I see is the replacement of Groups with Google Checkout, other people saw links to Google Reader, Google Maps, Blogger and other services. Maybe users should select their favorite services and the navigation links should be displayed consistently and extensively. It's weird that Google tested a page that let you customize those links but decided not to use it.

Google has just launched a gadget for Google Talk. It works similarly to the version embedded into Gmail, but it's created in Flash, so it has a richer interface. Each conversation has its own tab, so the gadget doesn't occupy too much space. It's also easier to search your contacts and to invite other people.

Some extra features:

* paste a link to a video from YouTube or Google Video and you'll see the title of the video and a thumbnail. If you click on "Play" an embedded player will show up and you'll be able to see the video inside the gadget.

* paste a link to an album or photo from Picasa Web and the gadget will display a thumbnail and some details. If you click on "View", the photos will be displayed in a small slideshow.

* you can also add links to videos and albums in your status. If your contacts use the gadget, they'll be able to see the content without opening a new page.

* the gadget can be added to your web page, although it won't be very useful there.


Here's a video from Google that explains more about the gadget:



{ Thanks, Zbyszek Żółkiewski. }

Gmail's quota will continue to increase in the following years. Google updated the code responsible for the storage counter from Gmail's counter and revealed what to expect in the future:

2835 MB on April 1st 2007
2980 MB on April 1st 2008
3125 MB on April 1st 2009
3270 MB on April 1st 2010
3415 MB on April 1st 2011
3560 MB on April 1st 2012

As you can see, Gmail's storage will increase with 145 MB a year (that's almost 0.4 MB a day). Of course, if Google doesn't change its mind.

On April 1st 2005, when Google announced the "Infinity+1" plan, the storage increased from 1 GB to 2 GB and, from that point, the growth rate was 3.456 MB a day. But from October 2005, the growth rate dropped to 0.33 MB a day.

{ via Niraj Sanghvi }