You can use Google Trends , a tool to measure search query popularity over time, to measure internet memes . [Hat tip to Kevin Fox and Julian Missig at Friendfeed for the idea.

Google recently started to automatically adjust the search box when you enter longer queries. This won't happen as you type, but once you're on a search result page and you entered a longer query before, the box length is expanded up to a certain point*. Dealing with user input in such ways seems to be a good pattern. For instance, when you enter a longer comment in the originally one-row input box over at Friendfeed.com, it will instantly expand to a multi-row textarea.

My Mini City lets you create a new village )without registering( and then see it grow as new unique referrers are pointed towards it. The city I just created, Blogoscopia , can be seen above in its current near-empty status. But others cities like Barbelith are already much bigger, sometimes showing impressive skyscrapers. By default, linking to your* city will increase its population when people click the link. But once the city grew a bit,

Ex-Google employee Jess Lee at her blog wrote about why she left Google to join Polyvore . When she first saw the site, she instantly fell in love, she says. After a quick sign-up, Polyvore allows you to create free-style collages out of everything and publish them for others to see )visitors can then click on items within the collage and sometimes buy them, which is how the site makes money(. Jess writes: <<It was like a combination of online Photoshop and Flickr,

Google's European research headquarters in Zürich is pretty advanced & quirky, as a video by the BBC shows . Among the ways to get around the different locations is to use slides and poles. BBC writes: "The building was designed for - and partly by - the 300 engineers who will work there. ... The wacky office is both a showcase for Google's unconventional approach to business and a symbol to prove that Google is no longer a US-centric firm.

Corey Trager was interviewed by Google and rejected, and wrote an interesting piece on the process he went through as a result. From Corey's post on one of the guys who interviewed him: <<This second guy was definitely an alpha. He made intense direct eye contact with me, unsmiling. He seemed irritated. He didn't shake any banana branches at me or make mock charges at me, but he might as well have. His flat, cold affect in turn made me, I guess, somehow try harder,

Commercials lie, including the ones by Google, as a statement by Gmail inventor Paul Buchheit would suggest. Here's the quote from the commercial by )now ex-Google employee( Joseph O'S.: <<So innovation comes from the employees often. One example is Gmail, something I worked on. That came from one employee, that thought that he could make a much better mail client. This seemed crazy, but he worked on it in his 20% spare time, and convinced some other people,

The new gadget feature of Google Spreadsheets makes it easy to add heat maps. This can be used to create a world map illustrating the Googleshare for a given keyword across different countries; now-Google employee Douwe Osinga called this " Land Geist " a couple of years ago. What's "googleshare"? Also called mindshare, the Googleshare expresses how much any two given concepts are related to each other.

Just few years into the technology, it's naturally still a wild web out there. Here's some of the stuff you might be repeatedly doing in your browser in 2008: registering for a website account,

Google's new benchmarking section is live now in Google Analytics . If you opted in to the servive, you will find it in your site stats navigation at Visitors -> Benchmarking. You will then see a number of charts from sites of comparable traffic, so that you can find out if e.g. your visitors stay longer on pages than average, or if they visit more pages than average. Your own site's traffic will be displayed in the usual blue,

Just for fun. [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: The Friendfeed Grid | Comments ] [Advertisement] Want to advertise here? Please contact me )Philipp(. Your ad rotates on all blog )graphic + text( and feed pages )text(.

The current news stories evolving around Tibet are the breaking headlines on Google News in many localizations of the service around the world - including Google News for Hong Kong, Taiwan, and even their China version at news.google.com. However, any mention of "西藏" )Tibet( is suspiciously missing from Google News China at news.google.cn at this time, as French Google blog Zorgloob found out. )A search for the word will yield stories,

Google Spreadsheets as part of the Google Docs suite added several new features; better revisions comparison through color highlights, change notifications, and a Google spreadsheet gadgets directory. )Auto-completion of values in cells may also be new, I'm not perfectly sure.( Revisions highlights Changes of revisions are now highlighted for easier reference; see the Revisions tab.

The Google Japan homepage was redesigned, as some of you are seeing it )and as the Google Japan blog reports(. Perhaps this only shows in some locations - I can't see it yet - but Colin Colehour posted some screenshots in the forum. As far as I can tell the four tabs consist of: Gmail, YouTube, News, Maps, and Transit )?( Image search, Notebook )?( Blog search , Books, Google Desktop Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Reader, Google Toolbar YouTube )again(, Picasa,

Google updated their charts API , which they first released back in December 2007 . First of all, the old limit of 50,000 queries per user per day has been removed )though Google asks you email them if you receive more than 250,000 queries a day so they can better scale this(. Also, there are several extended or new features. Among them are radar charts, sparklines, and maps. The last one is perhaps the most interesting, as it lets you display and color a map.

Fortune interviewed Bret Taylor on his present at Friendfeed and his past at Google [video] . Bret says )small edits for clarity(: <<I had a number of accomplishments that I'm really proud of at Google. But I think for me I really wanted to sort of, you kow, forge my own path, if we can do it on our own. When we make decisions, I get to just look up from my computer and say, "Hey, you think we should do this?" And then people say, yes, we should do it.

If you create a new document with Google Docs and edit it for a while, different snapshots of your document will be saved into the revision history for this document. Perhaps at some point you consider your document to be in a state where you want to share it with someone else. Hitting the Share tab and inviting a collaborator, the collaborator will be able to see your latest version of the document. However,

China blocked access to Google-owned YouTube during the current unrests among those fighting for more Tibet independence, several sources report. YouTube is currently hosting many clips on the issue with user reports, as a search for e.g. lhasa protests shows. Portfolio.com quotes a YouTube spokesperson saying that YouTube "is looking into the matter, and working to ensure that the service is restored as soon as possible.

Very cool: the recently released YouTube JavaScript Player API allows you to embed completely customized YouTube players, among other uses. I came up with this sample player that is supposed to be a sort of "hello world" of how you can implement the " chromeless player "; open the source code to the page to see how it's done. While I created a more traditional time bar,

A newer version of what seems to be the guideline document for Google's quality raters* has surfaced )I don't know when it surfaced, but it may have been recently(. Brian Ussery gave it a look already. 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.