Google Blogoscoped

A new book by Randall Stross is out; it's called "Planet Google" and covers Google's beginnings but also their latest actions and troubles. It's a very good, highly readable, well-researched and up-to-date introduction to the subject and will also offer bits and pieces of interest to those following Google more closely for longer. Randall both talked to Google employees and was there at one of Google's Thank-God-It's-Friday meetings (where employees can ask questions), but he also apparently had his ears close to the web to write the book. For instance, you'll find blog sources and Friendfeed comments among the materia ...

Google has rolled out their new interface design to the last of the Google Docs trio, Spreadsheets (presentations and Documents already had this new style). The tabs are replaced by an application menu. Google had announced this change last week; in the announcement they said that these changes would also allow them to have room to add more features and that users should "Stay tuned." [Thanks Hebbet and Avrohom Eliezer Friedman!]

Xujun Eberlein at NewAmericaMedia.org earlier this year writes about "human flesh searching" -- rénròu sōusuò, 人肉搜索* --, a kind of research mob of the digital world (this is a smaller excerpt, the article contains more details and examples): The first time I noticed the term "ren rou sou sou" on a Chinese website, I was taken aback. "Human flesh hunting" is a literal translation, but the term, applied to the Internet, means a search engine that runs on people power -- "human flesh searching engine." Chinese netizens have made up their own cyber vocabulary. (...) A popular new expression, for example, is "very pornographic, very violent," used to desc ...

In AdSense ads Google serves to websites, they don't always disclaim the ads as such; arguably, this job could be left to webmasters (though they sometimes do show the disclosure, which causes redundancy for those webmasters adding their own disclosure). However, even Google at their own site doesn't always add a disclosure, apparently. Take a look at the bottom of this Book Search page: it shows a blue box with text like "Master Hotel Management - Masters Degree to improve your career in hotel management. - www.Ritz.edu". Hovering over the link shows "...google.com/pagead..." in the URL, so I suppose it's an ad. [Thanks Ionut!]

Google's photo storing app Picasa Web Albums had a bit of a privacy vulnerability. When you create an unlisted album to send to friends, you'll usually not expect the URL to get out to non-friends -- that's why Google included an authentication key parameter in the URL so it's not possible to quickly guess the address (they didn't in the beginning, which allowed you to e.g. see Larry Page's unlisted album, but Google were later convinced it makes sense). However, Google allowed outgoing links in comments to photos of those unlisted albums. When you entered e.g. "Great photo, also see http://example.com" as a comment just a while ago, Google would automatically create a direct link to Example.com. As you know if you're a webmaster, when someone clicks such a direct link - ...

You can check the upcoming (Google) Android phone by T-Mobile in a rotateable view as well as in an emulator that lets you click through the menus. The emulator is rather incomplete though, so on a lot of screens you'll be seeing dysfunctional mockups. [Thanks WebSonic.nl!]

Google added text-to-speech capabilities to some Knol articles, like the one titled "File Formats in Digital Photography". You can download the MP3 as well as hit a Listen button in the top right. The quality of the speech output -- I strongly suppose it's all a software reading indeed, but asked Google for more background info in any case -- is amazing. Macbeach in the comments at Google Operating System writes, "This is the best text-to-speech I've ever heard."* Knol's help page on the subject explains, "We are experimen ...

Right now, Google wants to promote their desktop photo app Picasa 3 on the google.com homepage, but the link is dead... at least for some of us, me included.* "This is very wrong. 40 minutes, and still 404," Jérôme Flipo comments. [Thanks David Hetfield!] *In one browser, I'm getting a link to picasa.google.com/learn_more.html, in another to picasa.google.com/download_promo.html, but both show a "not found" message. Update: Ionut comments, "those links work well if you're in the US, but not outside US. Unfortunately, the homepage promo is not geo-restricted to the US." [Thanks Ionut!]

Colin Colehour in the forum spotted a couple of image ads in Google image search. In previous times image search was ad-free, but Google had already announced they're experimenting with ads there. I can't reproduce these here from Germany, but Colin saw the following light-yellow box titled "Sponsored Links" in a search for canon camera: Colin writes: Here's what I found out so far, you can trigger ads with generic search queries like 'shoes' or 'software'. Ads can sometimes be triggered with product names. I couldn't get a single company name to display an ad like 'Nissan' or 'Microsoft'. ...

Google has removed the dictionary link in search results for at least a portion of users, or perhaps all users, I'm not sure which (who of you is still seeing it? I'm not seeing it on computers in two different locations tested). Before, when you searched for a word in the dictionary -- e.g. "house" -- there would be a link leading to a definition in the top blue bar. Some years ago this was linked to dictionary.com and since January 2005, to answers.com. Answers.com may be suffering some traffic breakdown if this is removed for all, and not just a results prototype being tested. I actually liked this feature and used it sometimes, though of course there are many other ways to get to the definition results (like using ...

Why hasn't Microsoft already made their office tools available as online versions? It could set them up in a good position against Google's online office efforts -- the shift to the so-called computing cloud, the buzzword of recent times. I once heard someone argue they don't move to the cloud because it would cannibalize their own desktop office suite. But times are changing, and now Google boss Steve Ballmer said some interesting things, according to The Register: "We need a new operating system designed for the cloud and we will introduce one in about four weeks, we'll even have a name to give you by then. But let's just call it for the purposes of today 'Windows Cloud'" ...

As of recently the Google Blog Search homepage consisted of a simple search box, but now it looks more like Google News or Techmeme: it groups related stories into groups. To the left side of each cluster, you'll see how many blogs discussed this story recently, and the way this is formatted may remind you of sites like social news Digg. It would be interesting to know if Google gives more weight to popular or high-PageRanked blogs here. At the far left there's a navigation, again similar to Google News, which offers several topic categories like Politics, Technology, Movies, and even Video Games. As opposed to Google News though, search results ...

Google recently rolled out a search engine accessing their 2001 index, though the design of that one isn't quite like it was back then. Above actual screenshot from 2001 comes courtesy of Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land. [Thanks Danny and Tony!]

Imagine dramatic music, bright text on a dark sky background, and the words "Some days ago in a country far, far away...", followed by a floating title reading Privacy Wars: Attack of the Street View Car Clones. OK, back to reality... in a couple of towns in Northern Germany, politicians are starting to protest against Google's Street View cars, which photograph cities to put panoramic photos into Google Maps. Faces and license places are being mostly blurred as of recent times (though Google still privately stores the unblurred versions, and I guess it depends on local laws whether or not governments may poll for that material). According to

Google in India launched a new Labs service called Google SMS Channels, as Digital Inspiration reports. Digital Inspiration explains the service "lets you subscribe to news alerts, blog updates and other kinds of information like horoscopes, jokes, stocks or even cricket scores via SMS text messages," adding that Google SMS Channels are "free both for content publishers as well as mobile phone users who subscribe to text updates via SMS." [Thanks Amit and WebSonic.nl!]