Google Chrome Receives Heavy Criticism in Germany

Philipp Lenssen — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 13:50:53 GMT

It doesn't get any more "official" than this here. Yesterday, Saturday at around 20:07, Germany's biggest and oldest prime time news Tagesschau announced the following under the headline "Warning against internet browser"*: <

Google Chrome Tips and Pointers

Philipp Lenssen — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:28:34 GMT

Chrome is Google's newly released browser. It's currently available for Windows only. Following are a couple of FAQ's and bits of interest. Where's the search history button? In Chrome's interface the search history has been integrated into the back button - just hold down the mouse button when you're clicking on the back arrow. After a short delay, a menu pops up showing your recently visited pages. You can also access the full (searchable) history from that menu.

Privacy Concerns Over Google Chrome's "Omnibox"

Philipp Lenssen — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 11:37:43 GMT

From CNet : <

Picasa Web Albums Adds Face Recognition, Map Game

Philipp Lenssen — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 17:23:10 GMT

The Picasa desktop client has been released in version 3 with some changes , and Picasa Web Albums also saw a revamp with new features. For instance, there's now an Explore tag which lets you visually discover new pics by others. An interesting new feature is Picasa's face recognition. Google acquired image recognition company Neven Vision a while ago , and now Picasa got some of that technology, too*.

Google Calculator Part 2 (Pic)

Philipp Lenssen — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 16:19:04 GMT

[Hat tip to Dave Shaw and SEOMoz' 10 inexplicably weird search results for this result !] [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google Calculator Part 2 (Pic) | Comments ] [Advertisement] Want to advertise here? Your ad will show in the blog and feed.

Google's "Search Options" Prototype

Philipp Lenssen — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 15:31:12 GMT

One of the prototype search results Google is currently testing shows a "Search options" link in the blue results bar. When you click it, a navigation bar expands to the left side, promising to limit results to pages created "anytime", "past 24 hours", "past week" and so on. There are also a couple of alternative result views to enable; "longer text", "dates and places", "images from the page", and "publication date".

Chrome Links on Google Homepages, With an Error in Germany

Philipp Lenssen — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 15:14:50 GMT

Google is promoting their new browser Chrome on quite a lot of national homepages, from China to France to the US. In Germany, they temporarily advertised Chrome in the wrong place. Instead of a link below the search box mentioning the new browser, the red "New!" message was placed in the footer, the link text which led to Chrome reading "Advertising with Google". I bet this made quite a few Germans scratch their head earlier today... (by now, it's fixed).

Browsing With Google Chrome

Philipp Lenssen — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 00:12:21 GMT

After downloading and installing Google's new Windows-based browser Chrome - Google already revealed some background info via their comic -, like many of you, I gave it a first test run. A browser is the kind of thing you'll end up using all day long, if you do end up using it. You don't want it to get in the way at all, and yet you wish it has all the features you really think you need. Smaller interface usability hurdles sum up throughout the day,

Google Tech on the Toilet (Pic)

Philipp Lenssen — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 13:56:46 GMT

Nevon spotted above in the (men's) toilet at the London Girl Geek Dinners 3rd anniversary event at Google London, August 28, 2008. The info is provided by Google's Tech Stop (Tech Stop is one of Google's internal services to provide computer help). Shown at the bottom of "Episode 1: Have You Defragged Recently?" is the intranet address http://go/techstopsurgery . A longer running series is Google's " Testing on the Toilet ".

Google Chrome, Google's Browser Project

Philipp Lenssen — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 13:56:45 GMT

Today there was a comic book in my mail, sent by Google and drawn by no less than Scott McCloud, creator of the classic Understanding Comics . Within the 38 pages, which I've scanned and put up , in very readable format Google gives the technical details into a project of theirs: an open source browser called Google Chrome. The book points to www.google.com/chrome , but I can't see anything live there yet. In a nut-shell,

Google Chrome Screenshots

Philipp Lenssen — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 13:56:44 GMT

Google announced their browser Google Chrome to be available on Tuesday, but their download page and tour was already partly available at gears.google.com/chrome/ just now, as Uval in the forum noticed. While the download itself didn't work when I tried, I was able to extract some screenshots, from the frontpage but also the YouTube videos. And while the product tour videos themselves seemed to require a special group membership at YouTube,

Photos of Android Phone?

Philipp Lenssen — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 17:54:10 GMT

Engadget has photos of what they say is going to be a mobile phone running Google-backed mobile system Android . The phone is T-Mobile-branded and produced by HTC (Taiwan-based High Tech Computer Corporation, a member of the - again Google-backed - Open Handset Alliance, as is T-Mobile), and comes with a slidable keyboard.* [Via Reto .] *The last HTC/ T-Mobile phone I had I gave up on due to low usability, but then again, it had Windows Mobile running on it.

YouTube in 1985 (Video)

Philipp Lenssen — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 14:11:17 GMT

[Via Thai Tran/ Best of YouTube .] [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: YouTube in 1985 (Video) | Comments ] [Advertisement] Want to advertise here? Your ad will show in the blog and feed.

What Does a Video Ad On the YouTube Homepage Cost?

Philipp Lenssen — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 13:56:13 GMT

$175,000 per day, says Forbes in July, with an additional $50,000 that need to be spent on Google/ YouTube ads. (New ad formats may come up too, Silicon Alley Insider reports.) [Via GoogleWatchBlog .] [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: What Does a Video Ad On the YouTube Homepage ... | Comments ] [Advertisement] Find the right keywords for your campaigns at KeywordDiscovery.

Google Cuts Off Forestle

Philipp Lenssen — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 13:39:43 GMT

Based in Germany and apparently launched just this month, Forestle is a search engine using Google's Custom Search program. On their homepage they say, "Save 0.1 yd² of rainforest with each search you do at Forestle. So far we have already saved 25,024.6 yd² of rainforest!" Now when you do a search, the result shows a "Forbidden" message from Google, and above it Forestle prints this message: <

The Google Android Challenge Winners

Philipp Lenssen — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 12:22:02 GMT

Google announced the winners of the first phase of the Android Developer Challenge. Android is the mobile operating system and software library to-be pushed by Google and others. Here are some of the ideas whose creators received $275,000 (the $100,000 winners are available on Google's page as well): Cab4me: Helps you to find a taxi. CompareEverywhere: A price comparison engine and review reader. Ecorio: Aims to track your carbon footprint.

YouTube Captions Feature

Philipp Lenssen — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:31:45 GMT

Google-owned YouTube announced they now allow you to upload subtitles for your videos. These will display in the video if the user expands the menu at the bottom right of the player to enable the captions, as in this CNet video . The supported formats for captions are Subviewer and Subrip (*.sub/ *.srt). To upload such a definition, visit your video's edit page (accessible via Account -> My Videos) and switch to the Captions entry on top. For each video,

Google Experiments With More Colorful Checkout Badge

Philipp Lenssen — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 12:23:00 GMT

Google search result advertisers who sell products through Google's Checkout program get the special benefit of having a visible icon next to their ad ("Your AdWords ads will stand out", as Google says ). This could be an incentive for sellers to use Checkout, as the Checkout program has been struggling in the past (judging from e.g. Google's extensions of free usage for sellers). Now,

SUP, a Format to Tell Which Feeds Updated

Philipp Lenssen — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:33:42 GMT

SUP stands for Simple Update Protocol (officially, anyway, though it's perhaps an acronym or backronym for "what's up" aka "'sup"). It's a JSON-based meta format for RSS/ Atom feeds useful for websites that deliver a large number of feeds, like a blogging platform, so that services subscribing to that site's RSS feeds only need to download a single file to check for updates, and then download the other individual feeds as needed.

Content Owners Profiting From YouTube Uploads

Philipp Lenssen — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 21:17:47 GMT

Google's YouTube has a video identification system available to find copyrighted content. Google says there are currently 300 content-owning partners available who can be alerted by the system and who then face the choice of blocking the video, promoting it*, or getting a share of the ad revenues from YouTube (money from which the one who uploaded the detected video will not see a share, according to the New York Times ,

Google Video Onebox Spotted

Philipp Lenssen — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 20:12:10 GMT

When Ron (of Totlol.com ) searched Google.ca for iphone recently, he hit upon what looks like an experimental video onebox result. Instead of the usual thumbnailed videos displayed in list format, this box was showing two videos results side by side below the headline "Video results for iphone". Both in this search as well as in a search for love , all videos part of that onebox were from Google-owned YouTube. In 2006,

Obama08.com Redirecting to a Google Search

Philipp Lenssen — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 20:12:10 GMT

When you enter obama08.com into your address bar, you'll end up on a Google search for [Barack Obama]. This isn't any browser fallback for a non-existing domain or something... http://obama08.com actually has a temporary HTTP redirect towards that Google search URL. (Anyone could set this up, but I'm curious who did this and why - I can't seem to find any good info in a Whois query or on the Wayback Machine.) [Thanks Andreas Schneider!

Google Suggest To Become Default, Google Says

Philipp Lenssen — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 01:29:25 GMT

Google just announced they will start to roll out Google Suggest as a default feature for the Google.com homepage over the next week. For instance, when you enter "presid" with Suggest, below the search box choices like "presidential polls, "presidential election" and more will pop up, to be selected and then searched for using e.g. the arrow and return keys. Already, besides the Google Labs experiment which started in 2004 ,

Drawing the Google Homepage With Eyes Closed

Philipp Lenssen — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 15:48:34 GMT

I asked a couple of people to draw the Google homepage with their eyes closed during the whole drawing process. Here are the results: Brinke Guthrie's minimalist approach. Pascal of the German GoogleWatchBlog created this one. He says that "...schland" ended up on the table. Google's Matt Cutts created this one with eyes closed... ... and this one with eyes opened, but from memory. To my defense,

Google Translation Onebox

Philipp Lenssen — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 14:58:55 GMT

Google has a new direct result showing translations, triggered for certain queries. Here are some examples: [ translate Hello into French ] - Google offers the translation "allô, bonjour". [ translate Einkommensteuer ] - "Einkommensteuer" is a German word meaning "income tax". As the target language was omitted, Google translates to English.

Extension Filters Out Undesirable YouTube Comments

Philipp Lenssen — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 13:09:06 GMT

Christopher Finke's Firefox extension YouTube Comment Snob hides all YouTube video comments which meet certain criterias like comments without capital letters, comments with excessive punctuation, comments with over 2 spelling mistakes and so on. Google has another way to deal with comments at YouTube, at least if you look at their authors at Google series : they disable them altogether. LOL!!!

Pitfalls to Avoid When Designing Forms

Philipp Lenssen — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 12:23:19 GMT

Many web forms are broken, usability-wise. Knowing these problems can make you avoid them when you design your own web forms, so here are some recurring usability pitfalls. 1. The risky reset button. In most instances, the form reset button is not needed, though it can almost always do harm if users accidentally click it - because it will empty the form without any confirmation box (in popular browsers and popular form implementations, anyway).

Google Dance 2008 Video

Philipp Lenssen — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 12:01:00 GMT

This video is from last week's annual Google Dance event, which allows Google and non-Google employees to meet up after the Search Engine Strategies. The robot shown in the video costs around $1000, depending on the version. As for the digital caricature drawings that were made, I'm not sure which tool they used but the Cintiq is available from around $1000-2000. For comparison,

Google Calculator (Pic)

Philipp Lenssen — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 17:43:47 GMT

[Thanks Haochi for the result !] [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google Calculator (Pic) | Comments ] [Advertisement] Google books at eBay : background info on Google, AdWords, AdSense, Blogger and more.

Google Releases Geolocation Features for Ajax API, Gears

Philipp Lenssen — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 12:18:00 GMT

Google provides a neat new way for you to grab the user's location information via JavaScript. It's the ClientLocation property of their Ajax API . All you need is a free API key, and then you can load their JavaScript file in your HTML, and access the properties city, country, country code, region, and latitude/ longitude (where available, that is - the values may not always be found by Google, and Google disclaims they are only "approximate").

Addictomatic Creates Instant News Pages

Philipp Lenssen — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 10:06:40 GMT

You can enter any subject into Addictomatic - like "google" or "comic book" or everything else - to view a customizable instant news overview page on it. The news bits are presented as little widget boxes and pulled from all over the web; some by APIs, but most by RSS, as creator Dave Pell says. (Addictomatic - or Addict-o-matic, as the logo says - was programmed by Crowd Favorite and designed by Bryan Bell .) Try the page on the topic "Google" ,

A Cat Named Google

Philipp Lenssen — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 09:20:54 GMT

Marina writes, "yes, I've a cat called Google, I've named it so because 'google' has a musical sound, and because I'm a great Google-user too !!" [Pics courtesy of Marina . Via Ionut at Friendfeed .] [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: A Cat Named Google | Comments ] [Advertisement] Want to advertise here? Your ad will show in the blog and feed.

Pick Your Search Engines at Hittery

Philipp Lenssen — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 14:59:00 GMT

Hittery.com presents you with a whole bunch of specialized search engines as widgets, and you can customize the dashboard by moving, removing, or adding specific search engines. It's a bit like iGoogle but for search engine widgets only, and taking the opposite approach to "universal search" approach by Google, which aims to deliver all necessary results from the same single search engine.

Google Offers Services to Bloggers at Political Conventions

Philipp Lenssen — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:14:02 GMT

The Wall Street Journal writes: <

Google's File-Not-Found Helper Widget

Philipp Lenssen — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 18:36:23 GMT

Google now offers webmasters a JavaScript-based gadget to include into their 404 (page not found) pages. Depending on where the user went and what other pages are available on the server, this widget will show suggestions of where to go, and offer a search box (sometimes with a suggested query in it as well). To get the widget, log-in to your Google Webmaster Tools and pick Tools -> "Enhance 404 pages" from the navigation.

Google Calling Itself Names

Philipp Lenssen — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 13:32:46 GMT

Peter Gasser noticed that when you search Google Germany for google rss feed , the top result will point to the German Google Reader service... with a title that can be roughly translated to "RSS reader of data-harvesting octopus Google" ("RSS-Reader der Datenkrake Google" - the word "Krake" is typically used negatively in contexts like these to express that a company has its arms in every sector, with potential privacy implications). What's happening?

Google Poll: According to Scientists...

Philipp Lenssen — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 10:24:04 GMT

According to scientists : New data could help Canada stake claim to a highly disputed area of the Arctic seabed People can see the future An octopus has only six arms Ugly Betty will never come out on top Dogs pick up yawning from their owners Neanderthals and modern humans shared an ancient ancestor who lived about 660,

Unwrap Mosaics, a Form of Video Editing

Philipp Lenssen — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 09:17:40 GMT

The Unwrap Mosaics approach by Microsoft Research/ Weizmann Institute was presented at the recent Siggraph conference . In this project a flat surface is algorithmically produced and allows the artist to paint over it, like by adding a moustache to a face; the painted parts then appear in the video and adjust to the camera movements. [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Unwrap Mosaics, a Form of Video Editing | Comments ] [Advertisement] Want to advertise here?

What Was the Last Google Docs Document You Edited?

Philipp Lenssen — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 12:19:54 GMT

(If you're using the Google Docs document editor, that is.) [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: What Was the Last Google Docs Document You Ed ... | Comments ] [Advertisement] Google books at eBay : background info on Google, AdWords, AdSense, Blogger and more.

Google AdSense for Feeds Live

Philipp Lenssen — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 11:45:52 GMT

If you're using Google Feedburner feeds for your blog or other site (or you're willing to switch to using them), you can now include AdSense ads into it . The service had been tested with some publishers before but now it's apparently live for more. As feeds grow in features, the lines between normal HTML and the feed format may become more blurred... and the original reason why people switched to feeds - easy uncluttered updates, and perhaps ad-free content,

Google Slightly Adjusts Results Bar Color

Philipp Lenssen — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 11:29:38 GMT

Google has changed the color of the top bar showing above and below search results, making the blue a bit lighter than before. [Thanks Ionut !] [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google Slightly Adjusts Results Bar Color | Comments ] [Advertisement] Google books at eBay : background info on Google, AdWords, AdSense, Blogger and more.

Google Blogger Adds Feedback Vote Buttons

Philipp Lenssen — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 11:13:16 GMT

Google's blogging service Blogger, acquired in 2003 and chronically slow with new features but lately catching up more quickly, rolled out a new feature called "reactions." This is a quick user poll widget, available if you're using Blogger's experimental version, which lets you define a set of attributes like "funny", "interesting", "cool", or anything else. Then,

The Google Acquisitions Black Hole

Philipp Lenssen — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 21:30:27 GMT

What happens when Google buys a company? Sometimes, as Slate's Farhad Manjoo argues, the company and its product will enter the Google black hole ... not to be heard of again for a long time (or ever), with new sign-ups closed and existing users growing impatient. [Thanks Farhad!] [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: The Google Acquisitions Black Hole | Comments ] [Advertisement] Want to advertise here? Your ad will show in the blog and feed.

Barack Roll (With the Help of Google's Video Text Search)

Philipp Lenssen — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 10:47:07 GMT

I'm not sure Google thought of uses like these when they started to allow you to search the text of the YouTube video channels of some US politicians . Hugh Atkin put together a video of Barack Obama covering Rick Astley's song "Never Gonna Give You Up". "Yes", Hugh says in an email, "I did use Google's new full-text search." For previous videos of this nature he manually compiled transcricts of debates and searched for words.

Clustering Photos To Make for a 3D Scene (Video)

Philipp Lenssen — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 10:47:06 GMT

The University of Washington and Microsoft Research took many photos from a location from Flickr and algorithmically stitched them together to let users explore them in a 3D view . [Via Reddit .] [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Clustering Photos To Make for a 3D Scene (Vid ... | Comments ] [Advertisement] Google books at eBay : background info on Google, AdWords, AdSense, Blogger and more.

Google Shows PDF Info

Philipp Lenssen — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:36:21 GMT

For Acrobat Reader files, Google shows information such as the author in results now, like in this search . Does anyone know if this is new? [Thanks TomHTML !] [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google Shows PDF Info | Comments ] [Advertisement] Want to advertise here? Your ad will show in the blog and feed.

Import Another Google Spreadsheet's Data

Philipp Lenssen — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:21:35 GMT

Google provides a new function for spreadsheets: importRange . This will import the data from a Google Docs spreadsheet you saved into another spreadsheet. For instance, my first spreadsheet has the URL spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key= pvm6FPiylicLb_2cwmpkHfw &hl=en In it, I define a range named "PeopleAges" to make referring to this data easier. In my second spreadsheet I now edit a cell and copy the key of above URL as first parameter.

YouTube Removing "Free Tibet" Video Due to IOC Copyright Infringement Claim?

Philipp Lenssen — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 15:45:33 GMT

RevWaldo at Slashdot writes: <

Google Minus Google

Philipp Lenssen — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 15:11:31 GMT

Do you believe Google pushes its own properties too much in their search results? If so, Google Minus Google is for you. It's an unofficial clone of Google that looks just like the real thing... except, as the homepage disclaims, you'll search Google "without getting results from Google sites such as Knol, Blogger and YouTube." Creator Timo Paloheimo in his blog says Google Minus Google was inspired "by an article in NYT about Google becoming a media company.

Jeff Stibel on the Internet as a Brain

Philipp Lenssen — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 11:30:52 GMT

Jeffrey Stibel is the CEO of Web.com and a brain scientist and author. At his blog , he talks about The Internet & the Brain. He once told BusinessWeek, "Don't be afraid to make mistakes, and be proud of your mistakes. At the end of the day learning and getting experience and getting advice from others shouldn't be seen as a weakness, it should be seen as a positive." What are the similarities between the internet and the brain,

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