Google Updates On Labs Product City Tours

6 months ago, Google launched City Tours into Labs. It is basically a virtual tour guide, offering suggestions for walking tours of various cities or whatever search term you’ve entered. It’s not perfect. There is no way to recommend people walk down Google-recommended McDowell street in downtown Raleigh when they can and should take Fayetteville Street. But hey, it is still in Labs.

Now, City Tours is getting a few updates:

Show complete walking directions- In earlier times, Google estimated the time it takes to get from one destination to the next. Now, the directions offer entire routing information, taking into account such things as bridges, bodies of water, etc.

Import a My Map as a tour - Create a map of the things you desire to see. Then import it into City Tours, which will attempt to schedule a visit to all places on your map.

User interface improvements- These were designed to make City Tours perform more like Google Maps.

Google to boost up speeds with "Caffeine"

The holidays are not over just yet: Google has another special gift lined up for users this holiday season.

To bring in the New Year, Google will finally be implementing a latest update to its search algorithm, code-named "Caffeine," which is designed to considerably improve the speeds at which search results make it to the user's screen. For searches regarding larger multimedia files, like photos and videos, users will most likely notice the biggest difference.

A few people are saying they are already noticing faster load times, even though Google promises that the update will not roll out until after the holidays.

As for the actual results, not too much must be affected, though we can probably expect Google to go on giving more weight to social media. Less than a month ago, Google began including real-time updates (drawn from social networking sites similar to Facebook and Twitter) in its search results. An actual box appears in the results with an up-to-the-minute posts fading in and pushing older posts down.

While Google has been extensively testing out "Caffeine" since August, a latest survey concludes that users cannot notice the speed jolt. Most Web sites are not even optimized to take benefit of the update, according to SEO Marketing firm Irbtrax, which recently performed an indiscriminate study of 50 business and consumer Websites.

Still, Google has some serious stakes in its search engine, which has received a few slight competitions from Microsoft's Bing. Speed plays a central part in which search engine users decide to follow.

The Year in Review Captured On a Google Wave

From the same folks at Whirled Interactive who brought us the wonderfully funny “Pulp Wave Fiction” comes one more intelligent use of Google Wave as a video production medium — this time it is used to encapsulate the year in news and social media.

In “Waving Goodbye to 2009,” embedded after the break, we see a Google Wave rendition of the year’s most unforgettable moments. From the Obama inauguration to the Iran elections, from Susan Boyle to Kanye West, the video highlights the best and worst moments of 2009.

Check it out below and let us know what you think. Were any massive stories omitted you would have liked to see included (were we blind or did we miss an appearance from Balloon Boy, e.g.)? You may also check out a few other novel use cases for Google Wave, too.

The year in Google Doodles

Christmas Google Doodle is newest decorative logo to adorn search site logo.

Google on Monday unveiled its newest Google Doodle, a festive tropical Christmas postcard that overlays the company's logo on its main search page and the company will be rolling out a sequence of additional Christmas Doodles between now and the holiday, and is archiving them at this web page.

Google Doodles turn out to be so popular that scammers have started latching on the topics and planting malware-infected pages designed to trap those looking for more information on certain Doodle subjects.

It's been a fun also varied year for Google Doodles, some of which are seen in all countries, some in just a portion.

Translate a site, preview PDFs and page templates location released in Google Sites

In Google Sites you can now:

- Translate a site you visit that is not in your default language for Google Sites. This can be used by international co-workers to view the project site of a remote office if that project site is in the local language of that office.

- PDF files attached to pages and file cabinets can now be previewed with the Google Docs viewers therefore no need to download the file.

- You can now set a default location in your site for page templates.

Editions included:

Standard, Premier, Education, Team and Partner Editions

Languages included:

All languages that are supported by Google Sites

How to access what's new:

- If you visit a site that is not in your chosen language for Sites, there is now a 'Translate' link at the bottom right of the page which will translate the site for you using Google Translate.

- For a PDF file in Sites, clicking on 'View' rather than 'Download' now previews that PDF in Google Docs viewer.

- While saving or modifying a page template, choose 'Default location' to specify a location in your site structure. If a page is then created with this template, then the default location will be what you have specified.

Useful Google Docs Updates

Over the last 10 days Google has released a few updates that must be of interest to educators who use Google Docs. First, last week Google announced new options for searching and sorting your documents. In the past the only way to arrange your documents was chronologically according to the time of the last edit. Even though you put your documents into folders still the only way to sort was chronologically. Now you can arrange your document search by relevance or time stamp.

The 2nd enhancement to Google Docs announced previous week is a new option for exporting all of the contents of your Google Docs. You can now export all of your documents (up to 2GB, around 100,000 pages) at once.

At last, on Monday of this week Google announced a new co-editor option for Google Docs Presentations. The co-editor service permits users to simultaneously edit a presentation without stepping on each other's toes. When you use the co-editor for presentations you can see which slide(s) your co-editor is working on.

Applications for Education

The new "export all" option might be useful for students and teachers who would like to create offline copies of their documents with just a single click. The new co-editor for presentations might be useful for students who are developing group presentations. Students can collaborate without the frustration of trying to work on a slide that somebody else is trying to edit at the same time.

Google Labs updates transliteration tool

Have you ever wanted to type something in English and have the tool you are using spit that same message out in Hindi? What about Greek? With the aid of Google's transliteration feature, you can.

The search giant's Bangalore office wrote that typing on Roman keyboards makes it "difficult to type in Indian languages." In an attempt to find a fix, the team in India released Google's Transliteration offering. And on Thursday it announced an update to the feature.

The new and enhanced Transliteration permits users to select from one of 17 different languages includes Arabic, Gujarati, Kannada, and Punjabi, to name a few. Once that's chosen, they can type a message in English and have it instantly transliterated to the selected language. Users can also search for word definitions in the included dictionary.

Google India launches driving direction on Google Maps

Google India has launched driving directions for users of Google Maps. At present the user can now navigate around locations via Google Maps on their desktops and mobile phones using landmarks like petrol stations, banks, schools, railway stations, bus stops, local businesses & traffic circles and signals. India is the first country worldwide to get this feature on Google Maps.

Indians are more relaxed finding way on the streets using landmarks. Normally many roads in India are not marked with road signs and even if they are, the signs are not visible. In a few cases people do not even know the road names. For example, a friend asks you for directions to your house for a new year party, or to that nice picnic spot you recommended to celebrate a new year’s eve, you scribble a few lines on a piece of paper or explain that they must take a turn from a petrol pump or a bus stop or a grocery shop! Google today enables this activity online and share with friends and family.

In India, Google has collected good landmark data through user-created "Points of Interest" in Google Map Maker. Google’s new algorithm determines which of these landmarks are most useful for navigation, based on significance, and closeness to the turns that the user is making and other available signals. By this launch, Google will now combine landmark data, counted turns ("the 2nd right"), intersection names, and road names, and try to use whatever information is most appropriate and useful.

Google is providing two kinds of landmarks, to make out where users want to turn and to provide confirmation that they are on the right track. Google also encourages users to assist make directions even better for millions of users in India by enriching landmarks data through Google Map Maker.

Google Updates Maps For webOS

For the 2nd time since launching back in June, Google Maps for webOS has quietly received an update. The 1st update came our way back in October, and brought with it a number of enhancements, the most noteworthy of which were the addition of public transportation along with the walking directions to the already available driving directions.

This update brings with it a number of notable enhancements also. Unfortunately, there's no official change log to be found anywhere on the Google Mobile blog or even an acknowledgment that there's been even been an update, so we're left to our own devices to find the differences between this version and the last without being able to compare them side by side. Here's what we have got so far:

• Google Maps reports itself as being at version 6.7 (hit the Menu button > Help & Terms > About).

• There seem to be considerable improvements in overall speed and rendering. Menus open, transition, and close faster, and map rending seems vastly more robust.

• We now have kinetic scrolling

• An updated "Menu" interface with new graphics for switching among the Map and Satellite modes

• A new "Help and Terms" Menu

• Improved integration into local public transit systems (at least here in Portland, Ore)

• The ability to interact with the icons the map. Tapping on the icon of a business or a transit stop will bring up the associated listing, allowing easy access to phone numbers, directions, reviews, and more.

• A new dedicated "Results" button that, as one would guess brings up the results of a search query.

There is no question at this point that the majority of the webOS version of Google Maps is kept server side. After firing up my comically out of date emulator running version 1.1 of the SDK, I discovered that all of the changes listed above were there as well.

It is great to see that Google is actively committed to enhancing the webOS version of its Maps software It gives us trust that it wont be too long before we start seeing services like Latitude and (dare I say) Navigation to make their to webOS.

Google “I'm Feeling Lucky” button leads to mystery countdown clock

The feature, which generally takes users directly to the top result for their query, has been programmed to display a ticker when no words are entered into the search box.

As of 7.15pm GMT on Monday, the clock had reached 1,484,258.

Seemingly the blue numbers are only visible to people using the search giant's English language portals such as Google.com, Google.co.uk, Google.ie and Google.com.au. Attempting the same trick on Google's French and German sites gives an error box instead.

Google has not released any statement regarding the explanation of the hidden countdown, but initial speculation that the search engine giant had advance warning of the end of the world appears wide of the mark.

Simple calculations indicate that the number will reach 0 in 17 days – around the turn in the New Year.

If it is confirmed then this will be the latest in a long line of pranks and hidden treats dropped into Google products by the US firm's engineers.

Past "easter eggs", as they are known, include:

• Type "recursion" into the search box and it suggests "recursion" as an alternative, sending you on a loop of clicks that all generate identical results.

• With the arrow keys, type "up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A" while using the firm's RSS feed reader, and a little ninja appears on the left of the screen, which turns partially blue.

• The Mars feature of Google Earth 5 permits the user to explore the surface of the Red Planet and chat to the locals. Typing "Meliza" into the search box will takes you to an area of the planet where you can strike up a conversation with a Martian.

Google Earth Updates Mars Imagery

Google is always updating the satellite imagery in Maps and Earth to give its users with updated or better quality images. This comes in handy in lots of cases, so it is obvious why the company is investing so much in acquiring the imagery. If it were only that Google would be like any other company, however it also does things that most companies don't and that don't really have a clear financial incentive behind them. Google Earth has added Mars as a destination for a while at this instant, and Google has just updated a few of the imagery and also added some new information on several locations.

“The updates are from the High Resolution Stereo Camera aboard the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter. With these updates, almost half of the martian surface is covered by imagery having a nominal resolution of 25 meters per pixel. In isolation, there are many exciting, newly-visible surface features to see,” Eric Kolb, a Googler with a very nice sounding title, geo data strategist, wrote.

You can see the new data either in the embedded Google Earth gadget, if you are on Windows or Mac, as there isn't an Earth plugin for Linux yet, or you can download the KML file provided also view it in the desktop version of Google Earth. The new images are highlighted with a red frame whereas the 3D terrain data updated is marked with a white frame.

With the high quality images, Google further added some new, interesting locations which are also marked using colored arrows. New places include layered deposits on the floor of the Herbes Chasma, indicated by the red arrow, lava flows from the Tharsis volcanoes Ascraeus and Pavonis Mons, the white arrow, some new images of Olympus Mons' Aureole, the blue arrow. There are also some spectacular images of an enormous landslide in the Shalabanta Valles, the yellow arrow, which pushed debris over a vast area, the size of Chicago, Google says. At last, some ice and dust layers in the planet's north polar plateau, Planum Boreum.

Yahoo Establishes TV Show and Movie Refiners for Video Search

As Google is making strides in real-time search, Yahoo has to sit back and work mainly on the front end and the user experience, as the underlying technology is pretty much a dead end facing an imminent replacement once the Microsoft deal gets underway. However it doesn't mean that there's nothing to show, the company has been introducing all sorts of features and updates. The latest one involves its video search engine which has been getting some attention lately. When doing a search for a show or a film, Yahoo will list its characters as well as popular episodes in the left sidebar with the usual options.

“You may see that the left rail on our video search results page is becoming a place where you can use new ways to search online videos. By hooking into the “Web of Things,” we have created intelligent contextual refiners to narrow down your search intent intuitively,” Nilesh Gattani and Ranjita Naik from Yahoo Video Search wrote.

“The TV refiner that we are launching today organizes TV series queries in to main characters, popular episodes, and seasons.” The new features are like the ones Yahoo has been introducing lately, both on the video search engine and in the main one as well. In recent times, it has launched similar features for music videos, allowing users to simply find related information for the band or song they were search for. The new refiners extend the idea to TV shows and actors.

Searching for a TV show, similar to Arrested Development, will list the show's main characters, or rather the ones it finds the most videos for, but also the most popular episodes and the clips available from them. Likewise, searching for movie actors will list some of their most popular movies, allowing users to refine their search to videos exclusively from that movie.

Yahoo launches campaign to cheer 'acts of kindness'

Yahoo launched a social site encouraging web users to perform random acts of kindness in the run-up to Christmas.

The You In? Campaign directs users to kindness.yahoo.com where visitors are prompted to place details of their ‘purple’ acts of generosity and inspire others.

People are also encouraged to upload photos of their acts on Flickr, whereas Yahoo maps shows where they are taking place.

Yahoo said it will also take inspiration from those on the site, which also links to ways people can donate to charities.

Meg Garlinghouse, the senior director of Yahoo for Good, the online company’s community affairs division, said, “We believe that one small act of kindness can light a ripple of generosity also we hope to inspire the Yahoo community to create a wave of goodwill around the world.”

The campaign follows Yahoo’s multi-million pound it’s you branding campaign launched in the autumn which focused on Yahoo’s latest portal rebrand, which made it easier for visitors to add services as well as apps from Yahoo and other providers including Facebook and MySpace.

MSN will Launch an Online Lifestyle Site Targeted at Women

MSN is combining with the publisher of ELLE and Women's Day to create a new online lifestyle site for women. It will launch in the first half of 2010 and it will focus on style, beauty, relationships and home décor.

The news comes in the wake of the victorious launch of Wonderwall.com, an entertainment portal focused on celebrity news and the site averages 9.5 million unique views a month.

"Lifestyle is one of our top priorities because of its rising popularity and strong appeal to the adult female audience and advertisers that wish to reach them. We see a huge opportunity to expand on our present lifestyle offering by delivering a new experience that is unique to the broader lifestyle category," said Scott Moore, who is the U.S. executive producer of MSN.

I have to declare, this announcement reminds me of another certain online lifestyle site targeted to women: Yahoo! Shine.

Google’s real-time search is now live in U.K.

Google recently announced real-time search is now not just limited to the Trends page. It is now live across searches on Google.co.uk. The search giant announced the new feature on Monday — it pulls in public data from Twitter, MySpace and Facebook and makes use of it to surface content that has been recently published and shared.

Basically, whenever users search for something, the most recent news articles and posts on sites like Twitter will be straight away into your results, and those results will be updated instantaneously as new articles and tweets appear.

• If you do a search for “Obama,” you may see the latest news articles and tweets, and as you look at the page, more updates are added as they are published.

• Google has previously added time filters to its different search options, so you can now see results from the past day or hour. Now it is adding an option called “latest,” highlighting these real-time results, and an “update” view showing each addition to the search results as it is published.

• These real-time results will be available on Android phones and iPhones too.

Google says it developed “dozens of new technologies” to make this happen, such as a language model that can recognize which updates contain new information, and which are just “weather buoys” automatically repeating information posted by others.

Google releases its online dictionary service

BEIJING, (Xinhuanet) - Google has launched Google Dictionary, which provides users with definitions and synonyms. In addition to providing definitions from its own proprietary database of words, it also provides definitions provided by an extensive variety of scholarly sources. One can bookmark words and come back later, view a list of recent searches, and even translate words into different languages.

The company that will feel the greatest pain from this recent initiative is anticipated to be Answers.com. Earlier, Google would link back to Answers.com as soon as a user clicked on the "definition" button, but now all those links go directly to Google Dictionary. This might be a challenge to Answers.com resilience; which may possibly lose substantial traffic and a corresponding loss of advertising revenue.

Lots of current online and offline dictionary providers can also suffer as Google Dictionary attracts web traffic.

Google extends personalized search to all users

Google is extending its personalized search. From now on, all users will find their search results customized.

Google can stores up to 180 days of signed-out search activity in the user’s cookie. It stores searches users have done before as well as results they have clicked so that if they favour a certain news site Google will feature that site higher whenever it delivers the results.

"Now as soon as you search using Google, we will be able to better provide you with the most appropriate results possible", software engineer Bryan Horling and product manager Matthew Kulick wrote in a blogpost announcing the change.

Previously only users who were signed in and had enabled their web history on their Google account found their search results customized.



At present this service has been expanded to each and every user so they can opt out by deleting Google's cookies in the browser or click "Web History" in the top right corner of the search result page and then "Disable customizations".

So users can turn personalization off – but since it is switched on by default nearly all users will leave it that way, and privacy advocates will very alarmed by the fact that will be an opt-out and not an opt-in service.

Google says the aim of the move is to provide better search results to its customers. One more reason is that by building a better profile of users' web activity it can target ads more precisely.

But most of all, it will build the life of those involved in search engine optimization harder as search results will differ from user to user. From now on, convincing Google algorithms to move forward a particular site to the top of the search results will be all the more difficult.

Google adds translation to its main search engine

SAN FRANCISCO — Google starts weaving an automated language translation feature into its universal search service.

A new "translated search" tool lets people direct Google to search for results from Web pages written in an array of languages and then deliver the results in a searcher's preferred tongue.

The feature has been accessible at the Google Translate service, but is becoming part of the California-based Internet firm's popular main search engine.

"Now, when you search on Google for something in your own language, you may use this tool to search the web in another language," Google technical lead Maureen Heymans and product manager Jeff Chin said in a blog post.

"We are integrating it fully into Google search, making it easier for you to find and read results from pages across the web; even if they weren't written in a language you speak."

This tool can be found in a menu revealed by clicking on "Show Options" at the top of a Google search results page.

The Search Keywords are translated into languages that appear relevant, such as French and Dutch for a query about Belgium, also Web pages found are presented in the searcher's language.

"We will algorithmically select the best language(s) to translate your search query into and then return you translated results from those pages," Maureen Heymans and Jeff Chin said. "We will even display results from multiple languages."

Searchers can look for Web pages written in any of 51 languages and this tool will display results from as many as 5 languages at a time, according to Google.

Bing Announces The Updates For Maps

After ruffling feathers of folks over at Google with its revamped search engine, Bing, Microsoft has updated its Bing Maps http://maps.bing.com service to provide new features. The new updates include add-ons like overlays, a substitute to Google Maps' StreetView (called Streetside) and an improved "Bird's Eye" feature.

Bing also gets a new applications gallery where users can customize their maps, affix local information and check local businesses. Though Microsoft has not tried to re-invent the wheel with Bing Maps there are a few features on this one that you will not find on Google Maps. For example, there is this "LightSpeed" feature that that blurs the passing scenery to provide the user a feeling of "being there". Access Bing Maps also integrates Microsoft's Photosynth technology that helps users to browse 3D images. There is also a Local Lens, a feature that looks for local blogs, crawls the posts and layers them over a selected application.

Though most features compare well with Google Maps, the Streetside feature is not as comprehensive Google Streetview - and, users will be requisite to install Silverlight on their systems to fully use the service. One more issue, especially for India specific users, is that Bing isn't as comprehensive as Google in rural and other areas and the zoom levels on Google Maps are far better. However Bing Maps is a good alternative to Google Maps, it has some way to go before users can make a complete switch from Google Maps.

UPDATES: Google Street View launches in London

Londoners and others all over the world can now see themselves, their homes, cars and places of work on Google Street View.

The popular but controversial service launched in London yesterday.

It allows people to search for addresses and spot high-quality photos of houses as well as streets in selected locations around the world.

It is believed that a Google van with a camera was in London during the summer taking snapshots of the city. The service, previously available in other Canadian cities and around the world, was launched yesterday in London.

Google Street View is controversial because photographs of people along with their homes are taken without their knowledge and then uploaded onto the popular search engine.

A few, including the Canadian privacy commissioner, have called for the faces and license plates of individuals to be blurred so they cannot be identified.

Street View, one of several such services has launched in the United States in 2007. It sparked the biggest controversy in Britain, where surveillance cameras are everywhere but where a debate about a person’s right to privacy is raging.

To take a look at locations around the city, users can Google “map london ontario,” click on the Google link and drag the yellow person icon onto the location they want to look at.

Google to permit publishers limit free website access

SAN FRANCISCO — Google on Tuesday said it will allow publishers set a limit on the number of articles people can read for free through its search engine.

The move comes as media titans bash Google for profiting from online news pages indexed by the California-based Internet giant and served at free of cost to people searching for stories, photos or other material through online.

Google said that the publishers can join a First Click Free program that lets the Internet firm index website content however prevents Web surfers from having unrestricted access once they reach the online locales.

An Internet user’s first click leads to the preferred Web page, but attempts to delve deeper into a site are routed to payment or registration pages, according to Google.

"Previously, each click from a user would be treated as free," Josh Cohen, Google senior business product manager said in a blog post.

"Now, we have updated the program so that publishers can limit users to no more than five pages per day without registering or subscribing."

The change announced Tuesday means Google users may start seeing registration pages pop up when they click for a sixth time on any given day at websites of publishers using First Click Free, according to Cohen.