Google Digitizes Historical Newspapers

In its never-ending quest to organize the world's information, Google started to digitize old editions from newspapers like Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, St. Petersburg Times, Today's News-Herald and make them available at Google News Archive.


"Today, we're launching an initiative to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online by partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives. This effort expands on the contributions of others who've already begun digitizing historical newspapers. In 2006, we started working with publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post to index existing digital archives and make them searchable via Google News Archive," explains Google Blog.

The newspapers digitized by Google are available for free in an interface similar to the one from Google Book Search. Unfortunately it's quite difficult to read articles, even though Google automatically detects headlines and centers the associated content.

Google Video Suggest

Google Video started to display suggestions in the search box. The suggestions are identical to the ones used for YouTube probably because Google has a single platform for searching videos which is used by both YouTube and Google Video.

The number of suggestions is 5 and they can be disabled in the preferences page by selecting "Do not provide query suggestions in the search box".


So why use Google Video instead of finding videos on YouTube? Google Video indexes videos from hundreds of sites, many of the videos can be played without opening a new page and you can share them with your Gmail contacts.

Use Multiple Google Accounts Simultaneously in Google Chrome

Google Chrome's incognito mode is less sophisticated than IE8's InPrivate browsing, but it has a feature that will be useful for those who have more than one Google account.

When you open a window in incognito mode (Ctrl+Shift+N), your cookies from the standard session are no longer available and you can easily log in to a new Google account.


Chrome's help center has more details about this feature. "Webpages that you open and files downloaded while you are incognito won't be logged in your browsing and download histories; all new cookies are deleted after you close the incognito window. You can browse normally and in incognito mode at the same time by using separate windows." Michael Jeffrey explains that "incognito mode is a window-level mode - all pages viewed within this window are not persisted to the user's history, and incognito pages use a temporary cookie store that is blank at the start of the incognito session".

When you close the incognito window, all the cookies are deleted so you need to log in again the next time you browse in incognito mode. This trick can be used for any other services that allow multiple accounts, but you can only use two accounts at the same time: one in a standard window and the other one in incognito mode.

The Troubles with Google FeedBurner

Migrating FeedBurner to Google Accounts hasn't been a smooth process and the new FeedBurner doesn't look very promising. Last month, Google officially launched AdSense for Feeds and asked those who want to join the program to "burn" their feeds using FeedBurner. If you were already using FeedBurner, Google provided an email address where you could contact a Google employee to manually migrate your account (since then, the email address has been replaced by a form).

After a day or two, FeedBurner's new home at feedburner.google.com finally allowed you to log in. Some people found that the number of subscribers dropped to 0, but the most visible changes were the features which have been removed. The Googlified FeedBurner no longer includes web stats probably because of the overlap with Google Analytics, the feed stats history isn't available and you can no longer manage the list of email subscribers.

Another strange issue is that Google Blog Search stopped indexing this blog and many other blogs after migrating to the new FeedBurner. There are many other bugs related to this transition, but FeedBurner failed to acknowledge them.



Update. In about 2 weeks, Google has addressed some of the issues:
* Blog Search indexes feeds
* you can manage the list of email subscribers (there's even a new option to filter that list)

Blogger Followers, a New Social Application

Blogger has recently released a feature that lets you publicly subscribe to other blogs. Google calls this "following" and you can only follow blogs powered by Blogger, at least for now.

"Do you have a favorite blog and want to let the author and readers know that you are a fan? Well now you can do that and more with the Blogger Following feature," explains the help center.

Bloggers can add a widget that lists the people who follow a blog. Visitors can follow a blog from the widget and see their subscriptions in Blogger's dashboard or in Google Reader.


In most feed readers, subscribing to a feed is an anonymous action and the only public information is the total number of subscribers. The new Blogger feature indirectly adds public subscriptions to Google Reader.

Googler John Panzer has more details about the next steps:

"The Followers gadget lets you surf the network of people who read and interact with blogs. Just click on any of the followers and you'll go to their profile. For now, that profile is just their Blogger profile page with the blogs they own... but down the road, we'll also be integrated with Friend Connect. Which will open up this network further, in a couple of ways: A non-Blogger site can add a Friend Connect gadget to show the people following it; and you can filter the followers of a blog to show only the friends you already have on your favorite social network. Which you can view as extending your social network out into the blogosphere, or as the blogosphere incorporating all social networks -- take your pick. Of course all of this is based on OpenSocial, so anyone will be able to add gadgets and talk the OpenSocial protocol to access, with user permission, all of this network data and do new and interesting things on top of it. This represents a natural evolution of the loosely joined, standards-based pieces that have always characterized blogging."

The "followers" feature is not yet available for all Blogger users, but you can enable it by following a blog. The address is:

http://www.blogger.com/follow-blog.g?blogID=<BLOGID> (e.g: follow Google OS).

There are two options: follow the blog publicly and appear in the list of subscribers or subscribe anonymously. In both cases, the blog will appear in Blogger's dashboard and in a read-only Google Reader folder
that can be hidden in the settings.


Instead of building a social network like MyBlogLog, Google creates an application on top of other social networks. Incidentally, the application is first tested for blogger.com, but a future Google Reader API and the migration to OpenSocial/FriendConnect will make it look more interesting.

Google Analytics Tracks Chrome

TechCrunch reports that Google Analytics included Chrome in the list of detected browsers. It's probably irrelevant that 8.64% of today's visits for this blog were from Google Chrome because a lot of users test the new browser to see if it's better than IE, Firefox, Safari or Opera.

(Find the report in : Visitors > Browser Capabilities > Browsers)

Two days ago, Google Analytics Blog admitted that the web analytics service intentionally concealed the identity of the new browser. "Because Google Chrome was not launched externally until today, we haven't yet changed Google Analytics to recognize it when you segment by browser within reports. However - this will change in the coming weeks (until then, the browser will show as Firefox)." The blog post has been edited and it no longer contains the reference to Firefox, but I can't help wondering if Google Analytics hides other things.

If you want to detect Google Chrome, this user-agent should be helpful:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/XX (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/YY Safari/XX

For now, most services don't detect Chrome, probably because Safari has a very similar user-agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/XX (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/ZZ Safari/YY

Google Chrome Tips

Here are some not-so-obvious things you can do in Google Chrome, the minimalistic browser launched on Tuesday.

1. Show the list of recently visited pages from the current tab: right-click on the "Back" button. This also works for the "Forward" button.


2. Undo closing a tab: press Ctrl+Shift+T or open a new tab and check the "Recently closed tabs" section.

3. Focus on the default search option in the address bar: type ? before entering your query.

4. Perform simple calculations and unit conversions using Google Calculator by simply typing the expression in Google Chrome's address bar (or "omnibox"). To copy the answer, select the suggestion.


5. If you need more space in a textarea, resize it by dragging the lower right corner.


6. Monitor the resources used by a web page - right click inside the page, select "Inspect element", switch to the "Resources" tab and reload the web page. You'll see a list of images, scripts and objects loaded from the web page and you can sort them by size or by loading time.


7. Detach a tab and open it in a new window - just drag the tab outside the active window. You can also add it back to the original window using drag and drop.


8. After downloading a file, you can copy it to the desktop or to any other folder by using drag and drop directly from Google Chrome.


9. If the search engine of a site supports OpenSearch, you can add it to Google Chrome's search box by simply visiting the site and performing a search. The domain name automatically becomes a keyword and you should only type the first letters from the URL until you see "press Tab to search example.com". Then press Tab and type your query.


You can also manually add search engines, by right-clicking on the address bar and selecting "Edit search engines". Here's one example, where you can see that you need to find the URL for the search results page and replace the query with %s:

Name - Wikipedia
Keyword - wiki (that's what you need to type in the address bar)
URL - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s

You can also use the keywords for other kinds of services: for translating web pages, for bookmarking pages online or simply as aliases for web pages (omit "%s" from the URL).

Name - Google Translate (English)
Keyword - trans
URL - http://translate.google.com/translate?u=%s

10. Do you want Google Chrome without Google's branding and with an open source license (BSD license)? Check Chromium, the open source project created for Google Chrome. You can install the latest snapshots for Windows or download the code and build it in Windows, Mac, Linux.

To install Chromium in Windows, go to the most recent directory from this page (it should be at the top) and download mini_installer.exe. Note that these snapshots could be less stable than the version available at google.com/chrome and you may need to manually update Chromium.