Google is working on a new service called Google Translation Center . Just a short while ago, we noticed that "center" had been added to Google's robots.txt file, and now co-editor Tony Ruscoe discovered the link to the working frontpage... though logging in fails right now. According to the Google explanations on the frontpage and their product overview page , we can see this is meant to be a translation service which offers both volunteers and professional translators.

[ Image by Randall Munroe of Xkcd with some rights reserved . Hat tip to Rohit Srivastwa and Reddit .] [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Xkcd: Regrets )Pic( | Comments ] [Advertisement] Find the right keywords for your campaigns at KeywordDiscovery.

)... and why?( [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: What Did You Last Search for in Google?

The Telegraph writes: <<One of the cars that are currently filming every road in Britain stopped by police - for driving in a bus lane. The distinctive vehicle - complete with roof-mounted camera pole and Google logo on the door - was stopped in the centre of Bradford at 12.40pm yesterday. Eyewitnesses described how the Google car was followed through the city centre by a panda car with sirens blazing.>> If there's ever going to be a movie made about Google, please,

Aaron Wall of SEOBook reports that Google is experimenting with related search queries shown below snippets on result pages. I can't reproduce this as it's probably one of Google's experiments, but Aaron searched for link building and below a result from searchenginewatch.com, the suggestion "Related: link building software" was showing. Below a result from seobook.com, the queries "get more links", "link building 101",

Raw Story covers how a 22-year old cop was filmed while slamming someone off his bike at a New York rally some days ago. The YouTube upload of this assembled over 1 million views so far according to YouTube's statistics, and may have played a big role in opposing the cop's statements. The cop had claimed, among other things, that the bicyclist was deliberately heading for him. In another recent report,

Using the Google translator and the Babelfish translator, here's Garfield automatically translated from English to Chinese and back to English . [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Garfield Lost in Translation | Comments ] [Advertisement] Want to advertise here? Your ad will show in the blog and feed.

Google has bought video annotation site Omnisio to have their team join the YouTube team. Omnisio, as covered before , allows users to mix together YouTube videos. Also, Omnisio visitors can add comments over the videos in specific time frames - a feature that made some early Omnisio videos completely unwatchable, but you're now able to select whose comments you'd like to see overlaid. The acquisition statement on the Omnisio homepage says,

Google's webmailer Gmail has an apparently* new filter function named "Never send it to Spam". Ticking this should ensure that a certain email - with criteria you define, like by entering your friend's name in the "From" field - will not be accidentally sorted into the spam folder. It's a nice option to have as last resort, like when you identified certain types of good mail which never see the inbox,

Yuil is "a mashup of Yahoo! search results )using their BOSS platform (, presented using the new Cuil look and feel, and running on Google's App Engine ," as Tyler Hall tells us. )"Just in case things weren't confusing enough".( [Thanks Tyler! Links added.] [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Yuil | Comments ] [Advertisement] Want to advertise here? Your ad will show in the blog and feed.

The following snippets with accompanying thumbnails were taken from search engine Cuil.com )they are not a representative sampling of all thumbnails - Cuil gets it right sometimes - but it also doesn't take long to compile these errors, as they're not too rare either(.

Visual Adsense takes your Google AdSense Comma-Separated Values file as input and generates a chart like the above out of it. )As with any site where you'd share your information, apply some care and see if you trust them...( [Thanks Dantart!] [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Create AdSense Charts | Comments ] [Advertisement] Want to advertise here? Your ad will show in the blog and feed.

Alex Ksikes, who I worked with on GoogleModules.com some years back, this month with his team mates launched ChiefMall.com . Alex tells me "The search engine indexes a fairly large corpus of over 420 000 contractors and features geocoding and live indexing ... An interesting aspect of the site is that users can not only search for contractors but also post jobs to all contractors they have searched for.

Reto Meier is a software engineer in London. He blogs about technology, programming & Google, and is author of the book Professional Android Application Development . )Please note this post appeared at the Radioactive Yak blog first.( I'm a big fan of Knol , and I seem to have been spending an undue amount of time defending it from critics who, I believe , have the wrong end of the stick. But. Just because most people are judging Knol using an inappropriate comparison,

Back in May this year, Google OS and others noticed a Google Maps redesign experiment showing to a portion of users. Apparently, the results of the experiment are satisfying to Google, as the design was now made live for everyone )or if you can't see it yet, perhaps it's being rolled out for you right now(. [Hat tip to Keir Clarke and Jess Lee ! Also see Google's official post on this.

You might have heard of Cuil , a new search engine partly created by ex-Google employees. )As a Reddit commenter wrapped it up in reference to Cuil's result rankings, "It's a great search engine if you're not interested in finding what you're looking for."( What's interesting to note is that Cuil may be violating Google's webmaster guidelines. Not that everyone needs to comply to these, though a violation may bring a Google penalty with it.

The photo gadget of Google's 3D chat world Lively is working again. Its customization feature to add any pic you like had been disabled a while ago for untold reasons )the gadget is still broken though when it comes to do proper scaling of pics added to it - refer to the FAQ for one workaround(. On that note, I'd like to welcome you to Mackereel McRoy's Museum of Modern Stuff .

Motoko Hunt is originally from Japan and has been doing business in the US and Japan for two decades. She founded her company in 1998 and provides Japanese search marketing services in the US, Europe and Asia. She's also the co-chair of the upcoming Search Engine Strategies Tokyo conference and will be speaking at the SES in San Jose . Motoko loves scuba diving, heavy metal music and Guinness. By your estimate, what are the most popular search engines in Japan?

Reto Meier in a comment to the ranking debate over Knol wrote, "I don't see any evidence that the moderated collaboration is working yet." This led to some thoughts on the editing of other people's Knols feature, and the question "What is the motivation for editing someone else's Knol article?" For instance: When I edit someone else's Knol article, as opposed to what happens on Wikipedia, my edit may never see the light of the day. To see the light of day,

Some people noticed Knol articles are already sometimes ranking very well in Google results, even though Google promised Knol articles wouldn't get any artificial boost. Until further evidence comes in I don't think we've much reason to distrust Google's statement, and yet, the site does get a major boost all the same simply because it's in the vicinity of the superbly ranking network of Google websites )not yet on the PageRank 10 homepage,