Gmail Labs has a new feature that extends Gmail's search by showing results from Google Docs and Google Sites. If you enable Apps Search, you'll see a list of results from Google Docs and Google Sites below Gmail's search results. For some reason, Apps Search has a bug and returns incorrect URLs for Google Docs results, but I'm sure this will be fixed.
It's interesting to see that the Gmail Labs feature has been developed by the Apps Search team, which suggests that it's part of a bigger project. Most likely, Google will let you search all your data stored in a Google account from a single search box. If Google's universal search can combine images, videos, books, tweets, news articles in a single search results page, why can't Google develop an unified search service for Gmail messages, Google Calendar events, Google Reader subscriptions, Blogger posts, Picasa Web photos, contacts, tasks, Google Voice history and more?
Tip: If you want to search Google Docs and Google Sites, without displaying Gmail results, add -type:mail to your query.
Unexpected bonus feature: After enabling Apps Search, Gmail will show a "did you mean" message if your query includes misspellings:
YouTube experiments with a new search results page that lets you refine results by selecting related tags. For example, if you search for [race car], YouTube shows a list of popular tags related to your query: #autos & vehicles, #indycar, #cars, #wreck, #car crashes etc. YouTube also shows the list of tags for each search result.
If you click on one of the tags, you'll restrict the list of search results to videos that have a certain tag.
YouTube doesn't use only user-defined tags, some of the tags are video properties (#hd, #fresh), tags used in comments (#omg, #lol, #wtf, #ftw, #fail, #cute), usernames.
Google updated Android's voice search application and added support for actions. In addition to searching the Web, you can now use the application to send text messages and email messages, find songs and start playing them, call your contacts and local businesses, launch Google Maps Navigation and get directions to a location, visit a site using Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" feature and more. It's like iPhone's voice control, except that there are more actions available and you need an Internet connection to use it.
"Voice Actions are a series of spoken commands that let you control your phone using your voice. To use Voice Actions, tap the microphone button on the Google search box on your home screen, or press down for a few seconds on the physical search button on your phone to activate the Speak Now screen," explains Google.
Here are some examples of actions you can try after installing the app: * go to Google News * map of London * call [name of one of your contacts]
For some reason, you can't use the built-in app to play music, so you need to install Pandora, Last.fm, Rdio or mSpot before using actions like "listen to Morcheeba". It would be nice to use voice actions to launch applications or to use custom actions defined by other applications.
The new version of the voice search application requires Android 2.2 (Froyo) and voice actions are limited to English (US). Search for [voice search] in the Android Market or use this QR code. If you're not in the US, you want to try the application and you have root access to your phone, you might need to install Market Enabler and fake your location.
Google also released:
* a new version of the Gesture Search app for Android, which adds a motion gesture for starting the application * a new version of the Google Search widget, with support for query refinements * Chrome to Phone, which lets you send links and short texts from Google Chrome to a phone that runs Android Froyo. If you've previously installed the Chrome extension and the associated Android app, you should first uninstall them. There's also a Firefox extension that offers similar features.
When Google released a new version of Gmail, back in 2007, you could still switch to the old version by clicking on a link at the top of the page. At some point, the link has been moved to the bottom of the page, where it's still available.
3 years after releasing Gmail 2.0, Google decided to drop the old version, which doesn't include features like themes, Gmail Labs, Gmail Chat, Buzz, hiding labels or multiple file upload.
"You're using an old version of Gmail which will be retired in September. At that point, you'll be redirected to a basic HTML view. To get faster Gmail and the newest features, please upgrade to a modern browser," informs a Gmail message.
Most likely, Google continued to offer to the old version of Gmail because the new version doesn't work well in Internet Explorer 6. If you visit Gmail in IE6 and you haven't installed this patch, you can't switch to the new version, even if you manually change the URL. Staring from next month, IE6 users will be redirected to the "basic HTML" interface, used for outdated browsers.
Google rarely provides the option to switch to an old version of an application or a feature. For example, you can still switch to the old image search interface, to the old Gmail contact manager and you can still use the classic Blogger editor (an option that will be removed soon). Preserving the old version of a service could be helpful to determine if users like the new version, but it's not a good idea to keep an interface that's no longer maintained. Some users might never try the new version of the application because it doesn't look familiar, while other users might never notice that the initial bugs have been fixed.
"Google Translate is a free tool that enables you to translate sentences, documents and even whole websites instantly. But how exactly does it work? While it may seem like we have a room full of bilingual elves working for us, in fact all of our translations come from computers. These computers use a process called 'statistical machine translation' -- which is just a fancy way to say that our computers generate translations based on patterns found in large amounts of text.
But let's take a step back. If you want to teach someone a new language you might start by teaching them vocabulary words and grammatical rules that explain how to construct sentences. A computer can learn foreign language the same way - by referring to vocabulary and a set of rules. But languages are complicated and, as any language learner can tell you, there are exceptions to almost any rule. When you try to capture all of these exceptions, and exceptions to the exceptions, in a computer program, the translation quality begins to break down. Google Translate takes a different approach.
Instead of trying to teach our computers all the rules of a language, we let our computers discover the rules for themselves. They do this by analyzing millions and millions of documents that have already been translated by human translators. These translated texts come from books, organizations like the UN and websites from all around the world. Our computers scan these texts looking for statistically significant patterns -- that is to say, patterns between the translation and the original text that are unlikely to occur by chance. Once the computer finds a pattern, it can use this pattern to translate similar texts in the future. When you repeat this process billions of times you end up with billions of patterns and one very smart computer program. For some languages however we have fewer translated documents available and therefore fewer patterns that our software has detected. This is why our translation quality will vary by language and language pair. We know our translations aren't always perfect but by constantly providing new translated texts we can make our computers smarter and our translations better. So next time you translate a sentence or webpage with Google Translate, think about those millions of documents and billions of patterns that ultimately led to your translation - and all of it happening in the blink of an eye."
Google launched a slightly refreshed Gmail UI that hides unessential features and uses more screen estate to display your messages. Gmail's logo is smaller, the links to mail, contacts and contacts are grouped in a collapsible panel, while the options that let you select all messages, starred or unread messages are available in a drop-down.
"Overall, there's now a smaller header area that puts the first message in your inbox about 16 pixels higher on the screen than before," explains Google.
Gmail's contacts section has also been redesigned to better integrate with Gmail. The updated interface supports keyboard shortcuts, saves the changes automatically, adds structured name fields and lets you sort contacts by last name. The notes field is now really big, but I don't think it deserves so much attention.
These features will be rolled out today to all Gmail accounts. The new Gmail contact manager won't be available in Google Apps right now, but it will be released in the near future.
The Wall Street Journal got hold of a confidential Google document from 2008 about interest-based advertising, a feature that was released last year. In addition of providing ads that match the content of a page, Google wants to improve ad quality by creating user profiles based on the sites you've visited.
Selling ads is Google's big money-maker, but the online-ad business is broadening away from Google's sweet spot, selling ads tied to the search-engine terms people use. Instead, advertisers want to target people based on more specific personal information such as hobbies, income, illnesses or circles of friends. (...) Few online companies have the potential to know as much about its users as Google. (...) Significantly, however, Google doesn't mix the separate pots of personal data. For instance, it doesn't use data gleaned from a person's Gmail account to target ads to that person elsewhere online.
Google's internal document suggests that this might change. Google could use data from properties like Gmail, Orkut and even search queries to improve ad targeting. Here's an extract from the document:
Over time, as the value of audience targeting is proven and the market reaction to these practices is realized, we will discuss the use of Search data. Google Search is the BEST source of user interests found on the Internet and would represent an immediate market differentiator with which no other player could compete. Search could be used to populate user interests. It can also be used to create new surround-search targeting options in which relevant display ads (or text ads) could be delivered on [Google Content Network] to a user within 15-60 minutes of a given search, whereby the timeliness of the ad would presumably increase its relevancy to the user.
It's important to note that the author of the memo is Aitan Weinberg, a former DoubleClick executive who is now a senior Google product manager for interest-based advertising. WSJ says that Google's executives were against using cookies to track people online, but the DoubleClick acquisition changed their perspective.
For the first time, Google had the ability to deliver ads targeted to individual people's computers. But just because it had the ability, Google didn't start using it. There was still too much internal resistance. (...) Tensions erupted during a meeting with about a dozen executives at Google's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters about 18 months ago when Messrs. Page and Brin shouted at each other over how aggressively Google should move into targeting, according to a person who had knowledge of the meeting. (...) Mr. Brin was more reluctant than Mr. Page, this person said. Eventually, he acquiesced and plans for Google to sell ads targeted to people's interests went ahead.
Despite the internal resistance, it's tempting to cross-correlate data about users. Showing contextual ads in Gmail seemed creepy at first, but the ads turned out to be quite useful.
