Google launched another AJAX API, this time for language detection and translation. The API works for the same language pairs that are available at Google Translate and lets you display the translation of a text inside your own page, without having to link to an external translation service.

The translation API could be used to automatically translate some content from a web page using the browser's preferred language, to create a Greasemonkey script that translates to English the posts written in other languages, to detect if a comment is written in English before posting it and for many other things.

Here's one example of use, where you can enter a text in one of the supported languages (Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Greek, Dutch, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish), Google automatically detects the language and it shows the English translation. The sample text is from Le Monde.

Le département de la défense américain a demandé à Google de retirer des clichés panoramiques de la base de Fort Sam, au Texas. Google Earth ou Google Street View révèlent des petits secrets que les services gouvernementaux militaires et de renseignement se passeraient bien de voir diffuser.

Searching the web using a mobile phone is not always a pleasant experience. You have to open a browser, go to a search engine, wait for the page to load and type your query. Google tried to eliminate two of these steps by providing small applications that add Google's search box on the phone's home screen. This way, the search box is always at your fingertips and you won't have visit Google's homepage to type your query.

For Blackberry, the search application is included in the Google Mobile Updater, which is available at mobile.google.com. Google offers a similar search shortcut for N-series and E-series Nokia phones and for Windows Mobile phones at the same address. Google will probably expand the availability of this app to other mobile phones, although not all of them allow search boxes on the home screen. For feature phones, Opera Mini is probably the best fastest way to access Google search.


Because the search box is more accessible and it's so easy to enter your query, people search more. "When we look at the combined usage numbers for BlackBerry and Symbian versions of this plug-in, we see that users are able to get Google search results up to 40 percent faster. And, BlackBerry and Symbian users with the plug-in installed search 20 percent more than those without it," concludes Google.

"We have very much hit a watershed moment in terms of mobile Internet usage. We are seeing that mobile Internet use is in fact accelerating. The growing availability of flat-rate data plans from phone carriers instead of per-minute charges that previously discouraged Internet use, along with improved Web browsers on mobile phones as well as better-designed services from companies like Google are fueling the growth", said Google's Matt Waddell. iPhone was a great testbed for trying new interfaces and testing their impact as the Internet will slowly move to mobile phones.

{ Credits for the images: Google Mobile Blog. }

Google Spreadsheets, the most mature application from Google's online office suite, has suddenly become much better.

Now you can get email notifications when your collaborators make changes or edit some specific cells. You can also get notifications when someone submits new data using a form.


Google Spreadsheets autocompletes the value from a cell so it's much easier to enter repetitive data in a column.


If the existing features aren't enough for you, there's a new directory of gadgets that can be added to a spreadsheets and use existing data. You may remember the data visualization gadgets I found last month: they're part of this directory, which includes many other interesting gadgets. You can add interactive time series charts, Gantt charts, funnel charts, timelines, tables with filters and grouping, pivot tables, maps, search results and you can also create your own gadget that adds other missing features. As with any beginning, not all the gadgets work very well and the pivot table gadget created by Panorama doesn't seem to work at all.

To add a gadget, click on the "Insert" dropdown and select "Gadget". Each gadget can be embedded into web pages or added to iGoogle, which is extremely cool because the data is updated automatically.




Google Docs help center mentions a new visualization API connected with the new gadgets, but the documentation is not yet available. "The Gadgets-in-Docs for spreadsheets API should be used when you want to create user-facing features which are accessible from within the spreadsheet editor of Google Docs itself. This approach combines the Google Gadgets API with the Google Visualization API, to allow the developer to access data on the spreadsheet for use or presentation in practically any form they choose. Developers using this method should already be familiar with the development of Google Gadgets, and then only need to learn some basic additions provided by the Visualization API. Note that this approach currently only supports one-way interaction with the underlying spreadsheet (reading data), however, it has the advantage of enabling the publishing of gadgets created in a spreadsheet to other gadget-enabled sites, such as iGoogle."

If you find some interesting uses for the new gadgets, publish your spreadsheet and post a link in the comments.

{ via Blogoscoped Forum }

Update. A cool visualization gadget based on GapMinder World (you'll find in Google Docs as "motion chart"):

Everyone quotes Google's informal motto "Don't be evil" (it's not "Do no evil") when Google does something questionable. Wikipedia's article for "Don't be evil" includes a fragment from John Battelle's book "The Search" that explains its origins:

On July 19, 2001, about a dozen early employees met to mull over the founders' directive [to elucidate Google's core values] ... The meeting soon became cluttered with the kind of easy and safe corporate clichés that everyone can support, but that carry little impact: Treat Everyone with Respect, for example, or Be on Time for Meetings.

The engineers in the room were rolling their eyes. [Amit] Patel recalls: "Some of us were very anticorporate, and we didn't like the idea of all these specific rules. And engineers in general like efficiency — there had to be a way to say all these things in one statement, as opposed to being so specific."

That's when Paul Buchheit, another engineer in the group, blurted out what would become the most important three words in Google's corporate history. "Paul said, 'All of these things can be covered by just saying, Don't Be Evil,'" Patel recalls. "And it just kind of stuck."

... In the months after the meeting, Patel scribbled "Don't Be Evil" in the corner of every whiteboard in the company... The message spread, and it was embraced, especially by Page and Brin... "I think it's much better than Be Good or something," Page jokes. "When you are making decisions, it causes you to think. I think that's good."

Paul Buchheit, Gmail's first engineer, who now works at a start-up called FriendFeed, remembers that user's trust was an important decision factor.

At the time that the phrase was created, paid inclusion was a big issue, and we generally felt that it was rather evil due to its deceptive nature. In general, anything that involves deceiving your users is likely to be evil.

I think the most important effect of "Don't be evil" is that it gives everyone license to question decisions instead of simply following orders. I expect that the result is therefore reflected in thousands of small decisions and debates rather than a few large, highly visible issues. The other effect of course is that Google is held to a higher standard.

It's difficult to keep this high standard when you're a big corporation that needs to stay competitive. The difference between Google and other companies is that you'll never see news articles that question if other companies did something evil.

Eric Schmidt sees "Don't be evil" as a starting point for interesting conversations:

One day, very early on, I was in a meeting where an engineer said, "That would be evil." It was as if he'd said there was a murderer in the room. The whole conversation stopped, but then people challenged his assumptions. This had to do with how we would link our advertising system into search. We ultimately decided not to do what was proposed, because it was evil. That kind of story is repeated every hour now with thousands of people. Think of "Don't be evil" as an organizing principle about values. You and I may disagree on the definition of what is evil, but at least it gives us a way to have a very healthy debate.

To sum up,

Don't be evil =

"When you are making decisions, it causes you to think." (Larry Page)
"The most important effect of Don't be evil is that it gives everyone license to question decisions instead of simply following orders." (Paul Buchheit)
"Think of Don't be evil as an organizing principle about values." (Eric Schmidt)

A leaked copy of Google's quality rater guidelines (PDF), used internally to evaluate the quality of search results, reveals some interesting things about Google's approach to search. "According to the document, which is dated April 2007 and at least looks legitimate, a quality rater has the job to first research and understand a specific search query – say [cell phones] –, to then look at the quality of a website returned for this query," notes Philipp Lenssen.

Queries can be navigational (the user has a single site in mind, the official homepage of a company/product), informational (searching for information), transactional (trying to obtain something: buy a product, download a video) or a combination of these categories. Depending on the query, search results can be: vital (for navigational queries with a dominant interpretation), useful (comprehensive, authoritative resources), relevant (pages that don't cover all the aspects of a query), not relevant (marginally related to the query) or off-topic.


Google thinks that there must be a connection between queries and search results in terms of generality: broad queries are best matched by broad pages, specific queries by specific pages. Search results must take into account the dominant interpretation of a query in a certain location and at a certain moment.

Spam is treated separately from search results evaluation. A web page may be spammy even if it's considered "vital" for some queries or it's very authoritative. "Webspam is the term for web pages that are designed by webmasters to trick search engine robots and direct traffic to their websites," explains Google. Web pages that include ads and scraped content from other sites, but don't bring any original information are considered spam. "When trying to decide if a page is Spam, it is helpful to ask yourself this question: If I remove the scraped (copied) content, the ads, and the links to other pages, is there anything of value left? If the answer is no, the page is probably Spam."

{ via Google Blogoscoped and SEO Book }

Web applications track many user actions and use them for different purposes: improving the products, finding patterns, building user profiles etc. For example, Google Reader records some of your actions without providing options in the interface to access the data. Here are some addresses where you can find historical data about the items you've subscribed to (click on "View all items" to see all the posts).


* All the posts you've emailed to your contacts:
http://www.google.com/reader/view/user/-/state/com.google/tracking-emailed

* All the posts you have marked as unread at some point (to keep a post unread, you need to uncheck "Mark as read" from the options bar; note that "Mark all as unread" will not maintain this state):
http://www.google.com/reader/view/user/-/state/com.google/tracking-kept-unread

* All the posts you have marked as unread and are still unread (Google Reader calls them "saved items"):
http://www.google.com/reader/view/user/-/state/com.google/kept-unread

* Did you click on a post's main link to go to the original location? You'll find it here:
http://www.google.com/reader/view/user/-/state/com.google/tracking-item-link-used

* Did you click on a link from a post's content? The post should be included in this list:
http://www.google.com/reader/view/user/-/state/com.google/tracking-body-link-used

* If you use the list view, you can find the list of posts you've actually read (or at least you have clicked on the title):
http://www.google.com/reader/view/user/-/state/com.google/read

* Are Google's recommended feeds interesting? Check the list of recommended feeds you've subscribed to:
http://www.google.com/reader/view/user/-/state/com.google/recommendations-subscribed

* Did you accidentally dismiss a recommended feed? You'll find it here:
http://www.google.com/reader/view/user/-/state/com.google/recommendations-dismissed

After adding an option to edit locations, Google Maps allows people to add places. The option seems to work only for the US and you can enter few details about the local business or the place: address, name, phone, website and category. Google promises that "once you save your place, the whole world can find your addition by searching for it within a few minutes."

To find this feature, go to Google Maps, search for an address (e.g.: Madison Ave, NY) and you'll see a new option in the left sidebar: "Can't find what you're looking for? Add a place to the map."




You can also edit the details from existing listings and even remove places from the map. Among the possible reasons why you could delete a place you can find: the listing is a duplicate, the place doesn't exist, it is permanently closed or it's not of general interest. While business listings are changed almost instantly after you edit them, they can be removed only if someone from Google accepts your removal request. Each local listing can have a status like "Added", "Edited", "Removal requested" and the changes history is available to everyone.


Until now, only business owners could add places, using Google's Local Business Center. "We gather business information from numerous websites, Yellow Pages directories, and other sources to populate Google Maps search results. If you'd like to be included, you can easily enter your information into our online Local Business Center for free. (...) Once you've submitted your business information, you'll need to verify the listing before it goes live. You can verify using a touch-tone phone, SMS, or a PIN that will be sent via regular mail to your business address. Once the listing is verified, your information will normally appear in our results within six weeks," explains Google.

It's great to trust your users, but the places added using the new feature should be verified to make sure they are real. Turning Google Maps has a lot of practical advantages and could be used to keep the geographical information up-to-date.

Update: Google says you can edit places from the US, Australia and New Zealand.

(Based on a real song/movie/book.)

And you open the page and you step inside. It's an interesting post from a Blogger blog. After reading it, you want to post a comment and share your opinion, but there's no contact form. A strange link invites readers to "post a comment" and you reluctantly click on it. The link sends you to a web page from a different domain where you are supposed to enter your comment, but the comment form is too small and you can no longer see the original post unless you click on a barely visible link. For some reason, Blogger asks you to log in and it's not obvious that you can post a comment without having a Google account. Oh, and there's a difficult to read CAPTCHA you need to solve before clicking on "Publish your comment".

After all this trouble, the comment has been finally posted. Blogger forgot to auto-link your URLs, but that's no longer your problem. The big question is how to get back to the post. You want to give up and close the tab, but you notice a subtle message: "Your comment has been saved. It may take a moment for your comment to appear on the site at the original post." The last three words are linked so maybe clicking on the link will send you back to the original post.

Congratulations! You've managed to post a comment on Blogger. If this your first comment, it's likely it will also be the last one. "You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We are all a part of the same compost. We are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world."

Google's advanced search options are useful, but they could include ways to define more restrictions for search results. Maybe you want to find pages that mostly contain text, web pages that reference videos or include tables. Fortunately, some these features are available at Yahoo, where you can use the feature: operator.

iraq gdp feature:table - web pages that contain tables, unfortunately including layout tables

la traviata feature:audio - web pages that link to audio files (e.g.: MP3s)

michel gondry ads feature:video - web pages that link to video files (e.g.: QuickTime videos)

AJAX feature:acrobat - search results that link to PDF files

beatles feature:activex - search results that contain the object tag (e.g.: embedded YouTube videos or any other Flash object)

feature:activex site:googlesystem.blogspot.com - all the pages from this blog that include videos

You can also use the operator to remove some classes of web pages. If you want to filter web pages that use JavaScript, add -feature:script:

java -feature:script - old tutorials for Java

lagrange interpolation demo -feature:applet - interpolation demos that don't include Java applets

To find web pages that link to files with a certain extension, use the linkextension: operator. For example, linkextension:ogg bach finds web pages about Bach that link to .ogg audio files.

Yahoo has another interesting operator (depth:) that lets you define the maximum number of subdirectories from your search results' URLs. For example, a search for google tips depth:1 will include www.google.com/help/features.html because it has a single directory, but not www.techcrunch.com/2007/01/04/google-tips-pulled, which has three directories. This could be useful to find web pages that are important relatively to the structure of a web site.

The operator has a special value that lets you search only homepages: -1, as you can see in this query: flickr depth:-1.



I don't know if Yahoo's search engine is better than Google, but Yahoo inherited a lot of interesting features from AltaVista and Inktomi, two leading search engines in the '90s.

Related:
More Yahoo Search tips

YouTube has formally announced that it started to re-encode its videos in higher quality. "You may have noticed that we're now giving you the option of watching some YouTube videos in higher quality. We're making these streams available on certain videos, based upon the source file uploaded to us, and over time you'll find a greater percentage of the library is available to view in higher quality."

Two weeks ago, we learned about a trick that triggers the higher quality videos, if they're available: append &fmt=18 or &fmt=6 to a YouTube URL. Now you can choose the higher quality as a default option by going to your YouTube account settings and changing the video playback quality to "I have a fast connection. Always play higher-quality video when it's available."


The new setting is equivalent to appending &fmt=6 to the URL and you get 448 x 336 FLV1 videos with audio encoded at a sample rate of 44100 Hz, up from 320 x 240 FLV1 videos with audio encoded at 22050 Hz.

YouTube's philosophy seems to be about making sure that most people can watch videos, even if they have slow Internet connections.