Advanced Search Options in Picasa Web Albums

Picasa Web's search feature has been improved and you can now filter search results: choose an aspect ratio (landscape, portrait, panorama), select a size (small, medium, large or extra large), filter videos and view the files that are licensed using Creative Commons.

Just click on "show options" to enable the tool belt with advanced filters. The new options can be used to search the public photos uploaded by Picasa Web Albums users, the photos uploaded by your favorite users or your own albums.


Picasa Web Albums indexes tags, captions, album titles, album descriptions, and album locations, but many photos don't have proper metadata and they're not searchable.

If you've been using Flickr's advanced search page to find Creative Commons-licensed images, Picasa Web is another place where you can find images that can be reused or modified. For example, 81,302 from the 3,064,934 search results for [Oslo] are licensed using Creative Commons.

Manage Databases in Google Fusion Tables

Google Labs has a new service for visualizing data: Google Fusion Tables. Unlike Google Spreadsheets, the service is optimized for large data sets, so you can import tables of up to 100MB.

"The goal of Fusion Tables, as with other database systems, is to manage larger amounts of data than spreadsheets typically do. This size difference leads to a focus on a different set of functionalities. For example, Fusion Tables focuses more on bulk operations on the data (filtering, aggregation, merges). These operations are typically not necessary for smaller collections of data stored in spreadsheets. In contrast, spreadsheets preserve complete flexibility in managing data -- you can put any value you want in any cell and work carefully to format your spreadsheet to make it look nice," explains the FAQ.


You can import spreadsheets from your computer, select one from Google Spreadsheets or open a table from the gallery.


One of the samples, titled "Popular Baby Names -- 1880 to 2008", has 129,000 rows, but Fusion Tables displays 100 rows at a time. To manage a such a large amount of data, you can apply filters, show aggregates, create views that only include some of the columns.

There are many options to visualize the data: on a map or intensity map, using lines, bars, pies, scatter plots, motion charts or on a timeline. For example, you can visualize the popularity of the name "John" in the US, which has slowly declined since 1924.


To see which are the most popular male names in the US since 1990, I added two filters: year >= 1990,rank <= 3 and then I aggregated the data by male name. The bar chart shows that Michael is the most popular male name.


The service has rough edges and there aren't many options to perform computations: there's no support for SQL or GQL queries, the sorting options are limited and you can't add data using forms.

Even if it's just a pre-alpha version, Fusion Tables has built-in collaboration features: you can invite people as viewers, contributors (they are allowed to add columns, but not to edit the existing columns), collaborators or owners. Anyone who is invited can add comments to a cell or a column.

{ Thanks, Surendra. }

Google Translator Toolkit

Google Translator Toolkit is a new service that lets you translate documents by editing the translations automatically generated by Google. "Google Translator Toolkit allows human translators to work faster and more accurately, aided by technologies like Google Translate."

You can translate documents stored on your computer, web pages, Wikipedia articles and Knol articles. After importing a document, Google generates the translation, displaying it next to the original text. You can select a sentence from the original document and Google lets you edit the translation.


Google Translator Toolkit includes the collaborative features from Google Docs: you can invite other people to edit or view your translations, but the application doesn't display the collaborators that are currently editing a document.


An interesting feature is the "translation memory", a database of already-existing translations. "As you translate new sentences, we automatically search all available translation memories for previous translations similar to your new sentence. If such sentences exist, we rank and then show them to you. Comparing your translation to previous human translations improves consistency and saves you time: you can reuse previous translations or adjust them to create new, more contextually appropriate translations."

Google's service will make it easier to translate documents online, but it's also a great way to improve the quality of the machine translation service.

{ via Blogoscoped Forum }

Google Video Adds Search Options

Google Video exposes some advanced search options directly on the search results pages: click on "show options" and you can choose between three layouts (TV view, list view, grid view), pick a duration interval, sort the results by date or view only the high-quality videos.


Google has recently added a similar feature for web search results and, even though it should make the advanced search options more visible, most users will never click on "show options" to find them.

Google Chrome for Mac and Linux, Dev Preview

In the past 9 months, Google Chrome's developers have been hard at work to post the Windows version of the browser to Mac and Linux. Even if the Mac and Linux versions aren't ready for the general public, Google decided to release a developer preview for those who want to use an early version of the browser.

"In order to get more feedback from developers, we have early developer channel versions of Google Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux, but whatever you do, please DON'T DOWNLOAD THEM! Unless of course you are a developer or take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software. How incomplete? So incomplete that, among other things , you won't yet be able to view YouTube videos, change your privacy settings, set your default search provider, or even print," explains the Chromium blog.

The Mac version requires Intel CPU and Mac OS X 10.5.6, while the Linux version requires Intel Pentium 4 / Athlon 64 or later CPU, and Ubuntu 8.04 or Debian 5 or later.

I installed Google Chrome 3.0.183.1 in Ubuntu 8.10 and the process was painless. Most web pages are rendered properly, with the notable exception of the pages that require Flash or Google Gears. The settings dialog lacks many of the options that are available in the Windows version, the bookmark manager doesn't work, you can't change the default search engine, but these are just missing features that will be added in the near future.

Google Chrome for Mac:

{ Licensed as Creative Commons Noncommercial Share-Alike by ebarrera. }

Google Chrome in Ubuntu 8.10 (initial warnings):

Enhanced Zooming in Google Street View

Google Maps added a new way to zoom in the street view imagery: by double-clicking on the object you want to see clearer.

"We have been able to accomplish this by making a compact representation of the building facade and road geometry for all the Street View panoramas using laser point clouds and differences between consecutive pictures. As you move your mouse within Street View, you'll notice that the cursor now has lightly-shaded geometry attached to it - it will show an oval when your mouse is following a road and a rectangle when moving across the facades of buildings," explains Google. The cursor geometry is called "pancake" and it's a shortcut for the best image that shows the object you've selected.


While the new feature is moderately useful, it's very annoying when panning the image. You're almost afraid to click on the image because the zooming icon suggests that you are about to zoom in. I'll use the keyboard shortcuts to navigate through Street View from now on: up/down/left/right arrows, Page Up, Page Down, +/- for zooming.

Google Squared Adds Structure to Unstructured Data

Google Squared, the service that automatically generates lists of entities and associated attributes, is now live. "Google Squared is a new way of organizing information on the Web to make it more useful and structured," explains Google.

For example, if you search for [African countries], Google Squared generates a list of countries, then it finds attributes that should be appropriate when you describe a country (capital, currency, image/map) and it tries to find values for the attributes. Google Squared shows only the first 7 results, but you can always add new results and even new attributes. Clicking on the first blank column, Google Squared suggests 5 new columns: area, religion, language, GDP and Internet users.



A search for [endangered species] returns relevant search results, although Wikipedia has a more comprehensive list.


Google Squared is good at finding palindromes from a lot of sources:



Google Squared's results aren't always great: if you search for [Motown], Google finds relevant artists like Diana Ross or Marvin Gaye, but it mixes them with songs like "Got to be there".


If you find mistakes, Google Squared lets you remove rows, columns, select alternative values for attributes and save the customized square online so you can share it with other people.

The service seems to be a clever combination between Google Sets, which creates sets of items from a few examples, and Google Q&A, which extracts facts from the web (an example: [Britney Spears' mother]). In fact, you can even start with an empty square and dynamically add items and attributes.