Googlist

Google Updates Enterprise Offerings

2006-04-19T01:02:00.000-05:00

Fresh from the Google Enterprise Blog, Google announces its updated Google Mini and Google Search Appliance.

Google Mini is now half the original size and apparently 25x as powerful. It continues to provide a joint hardware/software solution for corporate search needs.

Google Search Appliance now features the OneBox for Enterprise, which displays relevant/current info from a variety of external and internal information sources for a given query. Additional enhancements for file crawling/indexing and user authentification seem very similar to the processes mentioned in the patent granted earlier today.

These new developments point to Google's increased interest in organizing corporate information as well as in maintaining a small, though very important hardware sector.

Google Gets 2 New Patents

2006-04-18T22:59:00.000-05:00

After finally getting its Voice Search patent last week, Google gets more good news: 2 more patent grants.

U.S. Patent 7031954 - "Enterprise Search"
Document retrieval system with access control
[full text]
Filed: September 10, 1997
Granted: April 18, 2006

The patent text describes the indexing of all documents across remote servers that pertain to a query. That index list is then served up to the user who made the query, based on the user's level of access privileges. Documents located on a level for which the user does not have access rights will not be shown in the file list. This synchronizes document availability and security across all parts of the storage system. The patent text makes many references to "corporate intranets" and the existence of security levels and a corresponding spectrum of user accounts. It looks like this patent was filed to protect developments in the Google Enterprise search division.

U.S. Patent 7031961 - "Social Bookmarking"
System and method for searching and recommending objects from a categorically organized information repository
[full text]
Filed: December 4, 2000
Granted: April 18, 2006

The patent text describes a social bookmarking system like del.icio.us -- but with some more developed capabilities. In addition to storing bookmarks for indivdual users and collecting data for the entire population of users, the system aims to "learn" from user clickstreams and bookmarking activity. The information gathered from this monitoring enables the system to better understand the quality of bookmarked information and then serve that up as new bookmark suggestions. The text also describes the value in the "distillation" of all of the web's content by the collection of users, essentially calling this a human-driven information filter. One implementation of the system described might be to influence the relevancy of heavily bookmarked items to related search queries (so they'd climb the SERPs).

Google Office - 2 Domain Registration Clues

2006-04-18T09:29:00.000-05:00

When Google acquired Writely we saw that Google is interested in either building components for its own "office suite" or at least staving off competitors' access to these tools and their masterminds through acquisition.

Here are 2 more clues that Google might be developing Power Point and Excel competitors:

GoogleGrid .net .org .info (.com owned by 3rd party)
GoogleLecture .com .net .org .info

Google registered the top-level domains for GoogleLecture and GoogleGrid on the same day last year, January 14, 2005. Google's domain name registration patterns indicate that when a set of related domains is registered on all of the major top levels on the same day, a product release is coming. (Although Google may never release its products at GoogleProduct.com, it registers the names to prevent spammers/competitors from redirecting traffic otherwise meant for product.google.com.)

Google Grid
The phrase "Google Grid" was popularized through the video Epic 2015 as a futuristic look at Google's storage project - GDrive. But it also sounds like a perfect name for a web-based spreadsheet and data app that organizes data through grids. (Google might want to look toward NumSum or Dabble DB [review | demo] as acquisition targets.)

Google Lecture
This could be a red herring as Google refers to certain in-house video talks as "Google Lectures" (over on Google Video). But thinking bigger picture, Google Lecture also sounds like a potential name for a presentation app like Power Point/Keynote or the group work apps from 37 Signals. I do feel Google Lecture is an unfortunate naming choice since "lecture" has more of a drudgery connotation than words like "present." But certainly the registration of the name, so closely relating to lecture and presentations, is interesting.

In sum, since Google registered all top level domains for 2 office-related names on the same day last year, I'm betting that Google Office is very much in the works.

Google Calendar Finally Released

2006-04-13T12:00:00.000-05:00

At long last, Google Calendar was released last night. It matches almost perfectly the leaked screenshots and information from various sources throughout these past few months. I'll be posting a further review of Google Calendar after some testing so stay tuned for that and a roundup of the responses to Google's long-awaited scheduling app.

Rumor: Google Acquires Dulance

2006-04-12T01:53:00.000-05:00

Techworld is reporting that Google has quietly acquired shopping engine Dulance. (And apparently, Sergei Burkov, Dulance's former CEO, will head up Google's R&D projects in Russia.)

Why would Google buy Dulance?
Dulance was an RSS-powered shopping site that spidered and scraped retail sites to find product prices -- without relying on retailers to upload product data feeds. It is estimated that because shopping engines use these opt-in retailer feeds, they only serve up 10% of the web's available product inventory (see Wikipedia on Dulance). Incorporating Dulance's technology would extend Froogle's reach into the uncrawled depths of retailer websites where the other 90% of products are waiting. Most importantly, the Dulance technology would give shoppers substantial justification for choosing Froogle over other shopping engines like Shopping, PriceGrabber, NexTag, etc, which currently still rely on retailer feeds. (Related Reading: See my post Froogle Local Finds No Socks in NYC for understanding the need for auto-discovery of products on retailers' websites.)

What happened to Dulance?
The domain dulance.com, where the shopping engine was once located, no longer resolves. You can, however, see previous versions of the shopping site on Internet Archive. SearchEngineWatch noted Dulance's disappearance briefly last month, which means it is possible the acquisition took place silently several weeks ago. To date, Google has made no comment on Dulance, so keep in mind this acquisition is just a rumor.

Writely Invite Giveaway

2006-04-11T17:55:00.000-05:00

Need a Writely invite? I now have 50 invitations for readers thanks to the more generous invite limits! To claim yours, just leave your email address in the comments. I'll do my best to accomodate everyone!

Related Reading:
Google's Writely: An Inside Look

Gmail as Art

2006-04-11T14:51:00.000-05:00

Gregory Trefry recently wrote an intriguing vignette in PopMatters ("Gmail: Art and Design?") that explores Google's Gmail as an aesthetic feat. Greg reviews the way Gmail has helped him better understand not just email storage but his brain's organization of "real life" information. Here's his revelation on Gmail's message threading:

"With Gmail, when you reply, the program does not even offer a field to change the subject line...This...seems to be exhorting us to order our thoughts more tidily. Gmail is saying to you, "This is a conversation, not a message. It's ongoing and related, not singular and disconnected. You will think of this message as part of that conversation." This line of thought eventually becomes baked into our mental organization. Now when I look at an inbox in another e-mail program, all of those repeated subject lines seem messy and scattered."

[This article also appears on Greg Trefry's blog I am the economy.]

Froogle Local Finds No Socks in NYC

2006-04-10T18:45:00.000-05:00

So I'm in New York City.
And I need some socks.

To find some, I type the query in Froogle Local:

Sorting results by distance and glancing at the map, I can see what's available. Hm, one result for New York City socks. That's one lonely pair of socks for almost 8 million inhabitants of New York City (I've circled just Manhattan below).

Zooming in I see my socks are part of an iDog Chill Set from J&R Computer World. While it's one of NYC's greatest discount stores, J&R is an electronics retailer. And those iDog socks are actually two inches long and belong to a stuffed toy I can hook up to my iPod. Baffling. So, I click around for more NYC socks, and there a few other listings, but it's more iDog sets and hampers from Home Depot. Does no one in New York need socks?!

As it turns out, the most relevant/proximal socks I could find using Froogle Local are at a Target in New Jersey. That's a couple train rides away, the expense of which is insupportable just for buying socks. Froogle Local, instead of pointing out a handy retailer near my home, has just convinced me I should shop online. Tricky, eh? Here's why this is happening:

Froogle (Local) is inefficient, because it relies on retailers to upload inventory
Froogle's usefulness is dependent on heavy retailer participation -- this involves a retailer laboriously uploading a warehouse of product info and keeping it updated on the Froogle site. Experiments like this one show that enormous sector of retailers are not participating in Google's Froogle program. It also means that I won't get any socks in NYC until some vendor proximal to me uploads a pair.

Blogger Tip: Related Content Module

2006-04-10T16:19:00.000-05:00

I mentioned in 18 Ways for Blogger to Beef Up that Blogger should support related content sharing in blog sidebars via feed headline publishing. Google seems to realize that this is a good idea -- but its two attempts to provide something similar have so far fallen short (Google Reader publisher module doesn't let you customize appearance much and Related Links doesn't let publishers control content). Google is still working on a successful, combined product, so I've suggested a quick solution for bloggers' related content: Google Reader shared feeds + Feedo Style feed publisher modules.

Make Your Own Related Content Module

1. Create a customized feed in Google Reader
Use Google Reader's labels and stars to create your own stream of news articles that focus on your information niche. Make the feeds under that label public as a single shareable feed URL. (You can also skip this step and just select the URL for your own blog's feed to share as a stream as I've done above.)

2. Create a customized feed headline box in Feedo Style
Paste your customized feed URL into Feedo Style's generator, customize the look and feel of the widget, then paste the provided code into your site. The result is a blendable news stream that instantly updates with the latest news from the specified feed. Note how this is much more nicely integrated into site design than the Feedburner headline generator, for instance, and much more easily added than currently available RSS-to-website scripts. Again, we're using a 3rd party tool here since Google Reader's publisher slaps everything with "Read in Google Reader" and doesn't let you change the style much. Feedo Style is friendlier to all varieties of newsreaders and CSS styles.

(After you're done making your blog's related content stream, check out the nifty scrolling headline module for Google.com/ig from Feedo Style.)

Google Snatches Orion and Ori Allon

2006-04-10T10:35:00.000-05:00

Although it happened weeks ago, we’re finding out that Google acquired search tool Orion and its PhD creator Ori Allon from University of New South Wales. In a quick summary, Orion is a complimentary tool for search engines that increases relevancy and breadth of results (see Ori Allon's September 9, 2005 press release).

No working demo is available, but Orion works to improve search relevancy by making sure results pages use keywords appropriately. Results pages for which the keyword is used relevantly get returned, everything else gets weeded out. The search results pages are then beefed up with highly relevant contextual snippets. Orion also displays results related to the keyword query so that one search can yield results for other searches of equivalent purpose. For example:

"Take a search such as the American Revolution as an example of how the system works. OrionTM would bring up results with extracts containing this phrase. But it would also give results for American History, George Washington, American Revolutionary War, Declaration of Independence, Boston Tea Party and more. You obtain much more valuable information from every search."

I find this an interesting but unconvincing example as the range of key phrases returned is far too broad. But this is useful for commonly synonymous terms like “web design,” “website design,” “site design,” etc if that’s what we are being led to believe this search tool can do. Another example of Orion’s “intelligence” (source MachineDesign.com):

"For example, a key-word search on the engineering resin "nylon" using a current search engine results in a list of over 100 hits. Seven, of the top 10, however, point users to Web sites selling women's hosiery. In contrast, reports Allon, with Orion when "nylon" is entered the search engine returns results with extracts containing the word nylon along with the associated keywords with the relevant text extracts — adipic acid, du Pont de Nemours, Dr. Wallace Hume Carothers, carbon, atoms, synthetic fibers, Nylon 6,6, and many more."

Here I see that the Orion technology is attempting to make human decisions on its own. It is true that for certain sectors of users, nylon as a subject of science and materials would be the priority but for another sector of users those ladies stockings pages would be the primary interest. Stockings and science are both highly related to “nylon,” it’s just that they relate in a different way. If Orion makes this preference automatically, then it’s a biased technology. This bias, however, could certainly be used neutrally to provide a set of "grouped" search results that allow the user to make his own bias, selecting only results from the search results group he feels is most relevant.

Perhaps Orion, touted as “revolutionary,” does contain some mysterious juice that would greatly improve Google. On the other hand, Google’s quiet acquisition might be viewed more as a competitive maneuver to ensure that none of this potential juice goes to other search players (Yahoo, MSN, Ask, etc). The easiest way to keep competitors from getting nubile technology is to snap it up yourself. If Orion were as good as it claimed to be, then Google no doubt wanted to be the only search player with access to the technology and to the brain of its creator.

So there you have it. Another day, another Google buy! And, oh yeah, another hire.

9 Notes on Google Related Links

2006-04-03T23:35:00.000-05:00

Google introduced Related Links in its Labs today. Here are 9 notes on the project followed by a few conjectures on its potential uses. (As this tool has been released for publishers to implement, most of these statements favor the publishers’ perspective.)

Fun for some users, just like it's supposed to be
Just as it is intended to do, the Related Links unit makes it easy for casual readers to quickly jump onto other information sources that discuss similar topics. The unit is somewhat fun to browse, seems to provide mostly relevant links on initial inspection, and does not cause annoying popups or sluggish load times.

But, publishers get no money
Web publishers do not normally provide contextually generated (and editor-unapproved) links without collecting referral payments. Currently, Related Links modules include links to 3 categories of information: Blogs, Searches, and Web Pages. Ads are not among these which means publishers will not be getting paid for the page real estate they surrender to these modules. On the upside, the FAQ says only that payment is not happening “at this time” which does not rule out a future revenue model. If ad integration happens, then it’s a brilliant way of mixing transparent/useful content with paid links in a way that combats ad-blindness (and potentially increases click through rates and thus revenues for publishers).

Without money, publisher incentive is low
Assuming these boxes remain un-monetized, publishers have little reason to provide link units to content that they have not personally selected or written. Such a module may, however, work for sites that are less concerned with providing original content or retaining visitors.

Related Links modules look like ad units
The units are available in 4 sizes: 728x90, 300x250, 468x60, and 180x150, all of which are standard IAB ad unit sizes. Either Google has designed these to easily replace existing ad units without breaking layouts or these are originally intended as ad units and have been repurposed as information modules for their introduction.

Actually, they look like Chitika eMiniMalls
Chitika has been doing these AJAXy, tabbed contextual link units for awhile now, only for profit. Google’s Related Links modules for contextual content and search queries look a lot like Chitika, an ad unit design that I have found to be oversized and unconvincing. Google would have done better to design these more as streamlined list modules rather than as box modules.

Some users will ignore Related Links
A) Many users have acquired ad-blindness, hence these ad-like units may be ignored. B) The units serve so few suggestions that it seems preferential to conduct one’s own Google News or general search in order to find related content, and a whole lot more of it. These units are targeted toward “impulse clickers,” who like shoppers in the checkout aisle, choose whatever seems interesting as they glance around.

Google is tracking referrals
The click URLs for the link units contain “client=ca-rlu-yoursite.com” where yoursite.com matches the publisher’s domain name. The click URLs also contain information that sends the link unit size and type of related link (search, web page, news) that is clicked. This means a few things: A) Google is keeping close tabs on how these link units are used, to be expected of course B) Reporting for Related Links units by size and placement may be available at some point C) Referral payments may not be far away should this graduate from Google Labs.

Related Links, not Related Content
Two reasons why this is interesting: A) Google has trouble being consistent with their naming. Script source for Related Links shows the product referred to as RC, related content, which is a bit confusing as the project has been discussed as “related content” around the web for weeks. Even the root URL for the program is googlesyndication.com/relcontent. B) The name does not cater to publishers in that it suggests links that drive away traffic rather than content that retains it.

Not customizable by domain
Related Links should have a “site-flavored" feature. Imagine that a blogger could publish a link unit in his post footers that serves up related content from his site only. This automates (in a way that WordPress plugins already do) the ability for publishers to suggest to their readers related reading on their own site rather than driving traffic away to related content elsewhere. Publishers should be able to isolate the related links to a smaller set of domains or just their own. Additionally, some publishers might wish to exclude competing sites from the Related Links unit with inverse targeting.

Better Ways to Implement Related Links
While the above notes are for the most part critical, I do see potential success for this Google Labs project:

A. Related Links could be used on sites that are less concerned with creating content and more concerned with presenting it. This, along with editor-selected RSS feeds, could make content "creation" nearly painless for certain types of web pages.

B. Related Links could be mixed with ads in the same unit. Web-savvy visitors begin to ignore ads, but if the same ad units will sometimes show relevant news stories, they might be more interested in glancing over those same ad units. (Publishers, of course, would finally win with this implementation.)

C. The technology behind the units could be integrated into Google's own search pages (providing contextual, Amazon-like suggestions for search queries and results). This has long been something I think Google could integrate subtly at page footers and with much success.

Google Sun (Google Galaxy Update)

2006-04-03T18:56:00.000-05:00

My earlier post on Google Galaxy | Google Universe | Google Solar System exposed Google's registrations of its company name appended with names of the planets and other astronomy terms. In that list, I overlooked another set of domains that Google registered on the same date as the rest of the planets: Google Sun (.com .net .org .info). Here's the updated list:

Planets:
GoogleSun .com .net .org .info
GoogleMercury .com .net .org .info
GoogleVenus .com .net .org .info
GoogleEarth .com .net .org .info (already released of course)
GoogleMars .net .org .info (.com currently owned by another party)
GoogleJupiter .com .net. org . info
GoogleSaturn .com .net .org .info
GoogleUranus .com .net .org .info
GoogleNeptune .com .net .org .info
GooglePluto .com .net .org .info

Possible Project Names:
GoogleGalaxy .com .net .org .info
GoogleGalactic .com .net .org .info
GoogleUniverse .net .org .info (.com currently owned by another party)
GoogleSatellite .com .net .org .info (created earlier on 4/08/05)
GoogleSolarSystem .com .net .org .info

Related Reading: Google Galaxy Starts with Mars

Ghosts of Google Labs

2006-04-03T02:49:00.000-05:00

The disclaimer on Google Labs says its projects "may disappear without warning or perform erratically." As a result, more Google Labs projects have disappeared than you might have guessed. The question is--have these apps been kicked to the curb or just removed for revision?

Google Voice Search
Search on Google by voice with a simple telephone call
The Idea: Pick up the phone, dial the Google Voice Search number, then say your query. Hang up and watch magically as the results appear in your browser.
Read More: Site | Review (w/ screenshots) | Research Paper | ZDNet

Keyboard Shortcuts
Google without the mouse
The Idea: Use the keyboard to sift through search results. Back, next, and entry-by-entry results page scrolling were the main features. U and J to go up and down, H and K to go right and left. View Google caches with C and similar pages with S.
Read More: Google Groups | SEW Article

Google Toolbar Experimental Features
Browser Control
The Idea: A popup blocker for the toolbar.
Combined Search
The Idea:Toolbar button for searching many of Google's channels simultaneously, e.g. one query would return results from Images, News, Directory, Groups, and general search combined.
Navigation
The Idea: Keyboard Shortcuts redux: mostly back/next functions.
Read More: CNET | SEW | ZDNet | Internet.com

Google WebQuotes
See what people are saying about your site
The Idea: A flavor of Google search that let you enter a website and see snippets of conversations about that site from other places around the web. This tried to illuminate a “conversational” aspect of the Web—sort of like a searchable trackbacks database.
Read More: Screenshot | Google Groups | SEW | Google Guide | ResearchBuzz

Google Compute
Your computer's idle time is too precious to waste
The Idea:Google Compute was an opt-in feature of the Google Toolbar. Its purpose was to donate Google users' CPU idle time to the distributed computing project Folding@Home. The Stanford Folding project aimed to harness CPU's everywhere as computing workhorses toward its goal of better understanding protein structures (thus the name "folding" as in how proteins are folded).
Read More: CNET | kuro5shin | FAH Teams | FAH Google Team | Wikipedia

Google Viewer
Look Ma, No Hands
The Idea:Type in your query, press submit, then sit back and watch as Google's results scrolled up your screen in an "automated slideshow." You could adjust the speed of the scroll (more tortoise or more hare?) and see images and context snippets of all linked pages in the search results.
Read More: Screenshot 1 | Screenshot 2 | Google Groups | SEW | ResearchBuzz

Google X
Roses are red. Violets are blue. OS X rocks. Homage to you.
The Idea:Access Google's services more easily with an OS X-like zooming mouseover dock. Google X was removed hours after its publishing on Google Labs. Even the Official Google Blog posting disappeared (see the cached post), making it seem like Google X never existed. Apple trademark threats are rumored to be the reason.
Read More: Google Blog (cache) | Mirror | Google Groups | Slashdot | Wikipedia

While some of these projects have been removed and have not reappeared (Voice Search, Viewer, Google X). Some like Keyboard Shortcuts and Browser Control have been repurposed (as Gmail keyboard shortcuts and the Google Toolbar's popup blocker respectively).

Other projects like WebQuotes could be reworked as a feature of Google Blogsearch or Blogger backlinks. Google X showed the usefulness of having more Google products accessible from the homepage, perhaps influencing the homepage's next redesign. And Voice Search is certainly a useful idea for the handicapped or multitasking cell phone user if perfected.

Let's hope we see some of these rough sketches re-released as fine-tuned products in the future.

1 RSS Feed for All Google Blogs

2006-04-02T02:55:00.000-05:00

Google added a new module to its Official Google Blog today that tracks RSS feeds from all of its official blogs (Inside AdSense, Blogger Buzz, etc) in a single feed. The mashup feed works by extracting all RSS entries that have been tagged "officialgoogleblogs" by a Googler who has made his feeds public.

The module has an easy link for adding the new feed to Google Reader, but if you use Bloglines, Newsgator, or another RSS reader, you can subscribe also by entering the below link into your feedreader's 'add feed' tool:

http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/10949413115399023739/label/officialgoogleblogs

Done and done. It's an easy way to keep up with all of Google's projects without adding 20 individual feeds to your newsreader. I've dragged this new feed to the top of my subscription folders and deleted subscriptions to the individual Google blogs, which will keep me better updated--with fewer clicks and less load time.

2 Years of Gmail

2006-04-01T16:22:00.000-05:00

Gmail celebrates its second birthday today, on April Fool's Day 2006. Here are some of the popular webmail app's biggest milestones with approximate dates:

April 1, 2004: Gmail introduced as April Fool's Joke--free, searchable webmail with 1GB of storage--a seeming impossibility that Google quickly affirms is real.

April 25, 2004: Active Blogger users invited to Gmail.

A long dry spell in feature releases begins as Gmail is slowly circulated via invitations. Invites come 3 at a time to certain users, then perhaps 5 or 12 at a time, and many months later, nearly unlimited invites are available to users. New features pick up again in 2005 as you follow the timeline.

August 20, 2004: Gmail Notifier (Win-only) released.

October 4, 2004: Gmail adds atom feeds and more ads to the interface.

April 1, 2005: Gmail doubles inbox storage to 2GB+ (from 1GB when it was introduced).

February 18, 2005: Google sends direct invitations to users who have signed up for accounts, rather than having them wait to be invited by other users.

March 1, 2005: Around this time, Gmail introduces its standard view and basic HTML view selector for feature-lacking browsers, like Opera.

August 26, 2005: Gmail begins tracking packages and mapping addresses.

September 1, 2005: Gmail Notifier for Mac OS X introduced.

October 19, 2005: In the UK, Gmail becomes Google Mail due to a legal issue over the name Gmail.

December 1, 2005: Gmail adds virus scanning to incoming and outgoing attachments.

December 8, 2006: Gmail gets Web Clips, small bites of RSS at the top of the inbox.

December 14, 2005: Gmail introduces automatic vacation response and contact groups.

December 19, 2005: Approximately this date, Gmail introduces the Switching Guide for moving from Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.

January 17, 2006: Gmail finally adds a delete button.

February 7, 2006: Chat hops onto Gmail.

February 10, 2006: Hosted Gmail for domains is introduced, invitation-only/beta style.

February 14, 2006: Gmail Chat and then Google Talk add emoticons.

February 18, 2006: Gmail nixes the Chat popups and rolls out Chat functionality to all users.

February 22, 2006: Gmail adds smart reply feature to fix mail flow for messages forwarded from other addresses.

March 2, 2006: Teen blogger finds supposed Gmail javascript security flaw--hole is quickly patched.

March 17, 2006: Gmail user's current and deleted email subpoenaed by DOJ, privacy discussions ensue.

March 22, 2006: Gmail Notifier for Mac OS X updated.

Of course, not included here are mentions of the incredible grassroots style third party plugin/extension building that has both beefed up Gmail and led to many of its official feature releases! Nor does this timeline hint at Yahoo's (and in a limited way MS Hotmail's) moves to match Gmail's offerings over the course of its existence. Nonetheless, this timeline serves to show that Gmail has indeed progressed from its "foolish" infancy into a robust web app.

So, Happy Birthday to my favorite Google product (after Search of course), Gmail.

Google Deletes Own Blog

2006-03-28T03:12:00.000-05:00

Sometime before 9:29 PM (PST): Trey Phillips goes to the URL googleblog.blogspot.com and finds a 404 not found error instead of the Official Google Blog. Opportunist that he is, Trey guesses that the blog has been deleted and races to register the username and blogspot hosting.

9:29 PM (PST): Trey Phillips makes his first post to the Unofficial Official Google Blog at googleblog.blogspot.com, complete with a standard Blogger template.

Google, fix your blog pleeasssee! <3

(P.S. Just to clear things up, I'm not associated with Google at all. I just wanted to take advantage of this before someone else with less worthy intentions did. The username was giving a 404, so I tried registering a new blog with it. Surprisingly, it worked. Oh, and no posting URLs in the comments or else they'll be deleted.)

POSTED BY TREY: 9:29 PM (PST)

[View screengrab of Trey's blog entry and the incomplete original post.]
[Link to Trey's post which is now a 404 not found.]

Between 9:29 and 11:15 PM (PST): Mass hysteria overwhelms the Google Bloggers. Trey Phillips has apparently hacked the Official Google Blog. Hysteria gets even more mass as it spreads to the blogsophere, audience to it all. Figuring out what happens, the brave Google Bloggers wield their power of eminent domain and wrest the Official Google Blog registration from Trey Phillip's hands just as he punches in another update to his unofficial version.

11:15 PM (PST): Official Google Blog comes back online (replete with all archives and original template), announcing that the Google Bloggers have rescued their blog and the rest of the world's bloggers have no evil forces to fear. Whew! Google is saved. Mid-celebration, the Google Bloggers quietly update their post to admit their blunder was little more than errant clicking on their Blogger interface.

And we're back
The Google Blog was unavailable for a short time tonight. We quickly learned from our initial investigation that there was no systemwide vulnerability for Blogger. We'll let you know more about what did happen once we finish looking into it.

Update: We've determined the cause of tonight's outage. The blog was mistakenly deleted by us (d'oh!) which allowed the blog address to be temporarily claimed by another user. This was not a hack, and nobody guessed our password. Our bad.

***

Most notable about all of this is that Google was able to quickly repair the deletion with saved versions of its post archives and blog template. Impressive, but expected from the communication channel of a large operation. Surprising to me, however, is that Blogger blogs are available so quickly after their deletion. Many accounts that issue individual usernames and URL's hold deleted accounts for a short period of time before re-releasing the names. Not so with Blogger apparently.

Thinking about what happened tonight, it is both humble and daring of Google to use its rather unsophisticated blogging tool to write one of the tech industry's most important blogs. But then, it would be ludicrous if they used a beefed up installation of say, WordPress, wouldn't it?

Googlewhacking Shows Confusion in Google's Redesign

2006-03-25T23:33:00.000-05:00

Over in Google Blogoscoped, I found the trick to set my computer's cookie to load the Google test layout that is currently circulating to random IPs. Thanks to Kickboy who wrote in with clues about the workings of this cookie several weeks back.

Q. What do the green bars mean?

The biggest thing to note in the experimental redesign is the appearance of green bar graphs for each of the major Google search types on the left sidebar of the SERPs. Because the metric of these bar graphs is not given, I set up a quick test to see if I could figure it out.

~~A. Number of Results~~

My first thought was that the graphs were meant to depict the number of search results available in each search product for the given query. So if the bar was almost fully green for Images and almost fully grey for Groups, you would instantly know that it was almost pointless to check your query in a Groups Search as there were almost no results available in that area. To test this, I hunted for a recent googlewhack ("speedwriter clockwork" via googlewhack.com) that would provide easy to work with results numbers, and then compared the numbers of types of search results to the graphs in the left sidebar. Here's a screenshot of the search results page:

And here are the numbers of results for "speedwriter clockwork" for each of the search types:

1 Web
0 Images
1 Groups
0 News
0 Froogle
0 Local
0 Scholar

As you can see, no results were retrieved in Images, News, Froogle, Local, or Scholar despite the green bar graphs on the SERP having prominent green areas. I find it a bit deceiving (or perhaps just inconvenient), that the green bar would even begin to suggest existing results in these categories if clicking over to those categories shows absolutely nothing. To make sure I hadn't hit a wonky query (which certainly googlewhacks can be argued to be), I tried a few more terms. Each experiment showed similarly: the proportions for actually available search results varied greatly from the proportional usefulness suggested by the green bars. So much for that idea.

~~A. Relevancy~~

With my initial hypothesis disproven, my next suggestion is that perhaps these green bars are meant to suggest comparative relevancy of the different masses of results? But if that's true, then low traffic terms need some adjustment. For the googlewhack example above, search relevancy should be nil for categories for which there are no results.

A. Something else

So what are the green bars, then? Search results numbers and search relevancy seem to be out (though maybe this feature is still error-ridden enough to throw us off).

What other thoughts are people having about the meaning behind the bar graphs?

Why to stop asking "Is Google a Portal?"

2006-03-25T22:21:00.000-05:00

Any time it releases a product that makes information access more comprehensive, more meta, or more personalized, Google gets labeled as a portal-in-progress. The recent news of Google Finance, with its practical applications, channel functionality, and similarity to the portal offerings of the early 2000's, has added to this Google-as-portal discussion with new noise.

Most articles frame these discussions with hesitant interrogatives: "Is Google already a portal?" "Google Finance: A Portal Play?" and uncertain suggestions: "Google Finance Sparks Portal Talk". Such discussion isn't new; Google has been a "suspected portal" for years now. And overall, the tone of these articles makes it sound like portals are a scary thing that Google wants no part in. With all the disagreement over whether or not Google is a portal, what's really going on here?

1. "Portal" is a sloppy word.
2. The portal, as we know it, is dead.

1. "Portal" is a sloppy word.

Here are a bunch of ways that portals have been described. They're all somewhat valid, and they're all somewhat inapplicable to what Google's end design seems to be. Take a look:

A start page
The page you set as your homepage, and most likely the one you use to jump to most of your web activities. Millions of people have Google.com as their initital browsing turf, so this must not be it...

A directory
A meta- or super- site that lists "all" other sites by topic, made most relevant in the days before search could retrieve more specific channels of information.

A collection of standard web tools in one place
A site with its own brands of email, news, search, weather, homepages, etc all neatly collected for its users. AOL's channels are the perfect portal in this sense. But Google's got its own "channels." So this must not be the key to portaldom...

A content aggregator
A site that combs the web for info on specific topics (though not through rigid categories) and displays it for your clicking fun. All content links lead to external sites. Google News anyone? In fact, Google's information retrieval system is one giant conglomeration of aggregation!

A personalized page
A page that customizes its offerings to your selections or surfing habits has been called a personalized portal. This peaked with the "my" services: MyYahoo, MyExcite, MyAOL, etc. But Google's already got this: Personalized Homepages at google.com/ig. Your Google account now lets you do all kinds of things tailored to your preferences: write email, blog your thoughts, make homepages, track stock portfolios, manage your website, and even make money!

A content aggregator + content provider
A step above a content aggregator is the one that adds its own content into the mix. Yahoo! is precisely such a site. This is, to me, one of the most interesting areas to project in Google's future. Will there ever be content provided? I would not count it out, but this is not part of Google's mission statement, "to organize the world's information." Organizaton neither implies nor requires creation. The new Google Finance is said to tiptoe into this territory with its group discussion moderators and highly specific company profile descriptions. I say that ain't content. Content is what's made when you hire salaried people to write information you can't find anywhere else. But if a portal is a way of getting somewhere, then should the portal's content--what it says--even matter?

A search/directory page strewn with links and ads
For those who say Google is not a portal just because it isn't messy like Yahoo, should clutter really be the defining characteristic in web terminology (portal or other) that implies information organization?

A browser's default start page
This is certainly a specific, outdated definition of a portal. But it's the idea that when you opened Netscape or AOL you were greeted by a page that Netscape or AOL had created with links and search fields that it felt would serve your browsing needs. When GBrowser talks were loud, Google Portal talks were just as vociferous. But adding a browser into the mix would probably not answer "Is Google a portal?"

A gateway to a collection of specialized information
FirstGov is an example of a site that claims to provide anything and everything you need to know about a certain topic. It's basically a search + directory for a specific category of information. Examples of Google's contribution to these specialized information sites are its News and Finance searches.

A site that labels itself a "portal"
Obvious. It really seems that the world will only agree that Google is a portal if Google steps up and calls itself one. But the company has no plans to release "Google Portal" and it will never activate the subdomain or directory portal.google.com or google.com/portal. So, if they're just waiting for a product release under the monicker "Google Portal," my hunch is, it ain't comin'. (For the record, Google's CEO Eric Schmidt has firmly denied "plans to become a portal.")

In summary: The reason no one can agree on whether or not Google is a portal, is that the word portal is just a sloppy description for services that Google already provides. Google (and many other companies) are pushing beyond portals.

2. The portal, as we know it, is dead.

In the internet sense, a portal was introduced as a way for net users to find information when the path to that information was otherwise unclear. The internet was in toddler phase and its users wanted to find the weather report without having to know URL's to get it. So a portal with links to everything, including weather, was the answer for that generation of the internet. As netizens grow increasingly more aware of the paths to the information they desire, then the idea of providing a page for people who don't know what's going on is increasingly of less use. Knowing URL's is much more commonplace than it used to be and the pre-eminence of search and specialized information hunting sites has made wading through hierarchies of links and pages of unrelated content a dead idea.

Jeremy Zawodny really poked at the endangered state of the portal when he said that the question isn't really whether or not Google will become a portal (assuming the collective conscious thinks it's not one yet), the question is what will the next generation portal look like? The comments on his thoughts include notes about discovery as the next great portal/path. Sites like Amazon use discovery to show you products that you may not have searched for but that probably relate to your interests. Google's related content tests show that the incorporation of discovery process into Google's many operations is not far away. Further speculations (as shown in highly customizable homepage interfaces like protopages and pageflakes) are that personalization at the individual's own discretion is also where the future of the "portal" is. In that sense, it's no longer a gateway, but instead a user's own guide map, written and discovered by themselves rather than forged by a company's static webpage vision for what information is interesting. We're leaving the days of company-forged content, and beginning to forge our own.

So whether or not Google releases channels for every type of information and whether or not Google collects all of these channels all on one page (Google.com only links to a few) with perfect personalization (the uber-Google Personalized Homepage), the concept of a portal is poorly defined and outdated. And so is trying to fit Google into it.

Error Message in Google Chat

2006-03-22T22:10:00.000-05:00

Google's record of "uptime" has always impressed me. I'm not saying there's never downtime or delayed product roll out, but rarely do I log in to any Google application and see an error message. It surprised me, then, to log into Gmail this afternoon and see this error which blends seamlessly into the Chats interface as if it expects to be displayed every once in awhile:

"We're experiencing technical difficulties that may prevent your chats from being sent."

I do not expect this connection fault to be a recurring problem, but I do wonder if it is in any way indicative of some revisions to the interface going on behind the scenes.

Ctrl + Ctrl to Quick Search

2006-03-15T12:52:00.000-05:00

Google's newest announcement is Quick Search, a Google search box that you can call with a quick double-tap on the Ctrl key during any computing task. No browser loading required--great efficiency hack! Quick Search is bundled with Desktop, which Google says has just left beta. Now before you get yours, here's the good and bad:

The Good:

Search Google without grabbing the mouse.
Quick Search works well if you're rapidly typing into your blog engine or word processor and need to run a query. Quick Search eliminates the annoying tasks of switching windows or even needing to run the browser initially at all. Now, you might be remembering a project that Google once had in its Labs--Keyboard Shortcuts. Before Google Labs dropped these, you were able to key through your search queries and pages. Imagine if Quick Search could initiate keyboard shortcuts on the resultant Google page so that calling a query and going through results could be handled entirely through the keyboard? Something to watch for.

Search interface is sleek, small, and loads (almost) instantly.
You might also notice that Google has enabled slight transparency on the Quick Search box so you aren't completely sidetracked from your active window.

Search News, Images, Groups, etc using additional Ctrl commands.

Instead of just hitting enter after your query, you can hit another Ctrl command to narrow your search to one of Google's specific search types:

Desktop Ctrl+D
I'm Feeling Lucky Ctrl+K
Images Ctrl+I
Groups Ctrl+U
News Ctrl+N
Froogle Ctrl+F
Local Ctrl+L

Google Earth is also available, but only through the drop down menu (use the arrow keys) that lists these search options.

Also search your desktop.
Since it's bundled with the Desktop product, this is just obvious. I haven't activated file indexing, but it looks like Quick Search uses a Google Suggest-like dropdown to show you potential file matches to your query. You can choose these instead of doing a web search by arrowing down to select the appropriate file or by hitting Ctrl+D as shown above.

Same shortcut toggles it on/off.
Ctrl+Ctrl opens the Quick Search box, and the same shortcut hides it if you don't feel like finishing your query. See the next note for some implications of these actions.

Query history clears after 30 seconds.
At first I was concerned that when I typed in "mongoose" then hid the window and instantly popped it up again, "mongoose" was still in the search field. All kinds of problems that could cause you in the office or on shared computers! But after some experimentation, I discovered that when you hide Quick Search rather than hitting enter to load the results, a 30 second timer is started. After 30 seconds, re-opening Quick Search will present a blank field.

If you re-open Quick Search within that 30 second window, the search will be saved and hiding the window again will activate a new 30 second count. So, unfinished searches are saved only in the very short term and you shouldn't run into problems with the next users seeing your uncalled queries.

The Bad:

Only comes bundled with Google Desktop.
Despite being a huge Google fan, I don't have Desktop installed on my computer. That meant I had to get it to try Quick Search. It's my feeling that Quick Search should be a separate, tiny tiny download that just integrates with Google Desktop should you prefer. If you share that qualm, you can download Desktop then disable everything (the sidebar, file indexing, etc.) and just enable Quick Search. The Desktop will run in your system tray (obviously in order for Quick Search to work), but you won't give up screen real estate or let your files be crawled.

The resulting browser window is a bit startling.
I was hesitant to hit enter on my first Quick Search query. Where would I be taken? If I had both Firefox and IE open, which browser would Quick Search choose? From my experiments this morning, it looks like Quick Search just goes with your default search engine preference. That means that in Firefox, it will simply open a new, active tab in the window you're working on. In IE, it will open up a new window. Score another for tabbed browsers that use less load time. No real way to fix the "startle" issue, but just be aware that your browser will "jump" to the top of your window stack in order to show your search results in the top active window.

How Google Gains:

Plus one (two, ten thousand?) for Google in search engine share wars.
Forget having to make you set your browser preferences in numerous places like your IE and Firefox browsers and your various browser toolbars. Once you've installed Desktop and if you've enabled Quick Search, Google has locked you into their search engine. They are building their SE share over Yahoo, MSN, Ask, etc.

They make you download Desktop.
Obvious. But it forces you to try and possibly adopt another Google product.

In the end, increases revenues all the way around.
The easier it is to search, the more you'll do it. And with more search comes more of Google's booming ad revenue.

SketchUp to Make Google Earth 3D

2006-03-14T14:14:00.000-05:00

Today, Google made the not so surprising announcement that it has purchased friendly CAD software company SketchUp. The 3D modeling company owned by @Last Software has been friendly with Google Earth throughout this past fall--holding a conference with Google Earth experts, submitting lots of 3D models to the program, and creating a plugin for Google Earth so that users can create their own placemarks. With SketchUp, you can take 2D drawings (scanned or computer generated) then push and pull them in various directions to bring them "up"--into 3D form. The program also allows for much more complicated surface rendering, shadow creation, and other tools of 3D modeling, but here is a screencast demonstration I have created to show how SketchUp software, at its most basic level, makes 2D drawings into 3D models. The link goes to a Flash demonstration in a new window:

Click to view a SketchUp screencast demo

SketchUp is currently not free (priced at $495), though it does have an 8 hour trial version. And so begin the monetization questions:

1) Will SketchUp still be available for purchase as an independent product for non Google-Earth related projects?

2) Will Google offer a free version of SketchUp (perhaps with reduced capabilities) for users to make their own Google Earth placemarks? (It's doubtful that the entire program will be released for free as the pay version parallels quite nicely to the paid version of Google Earth--Pro.

3) Should we expect a next generation Google Earth that has many of these placemarks native in the interface?

Looking forward to seeing what Google decides! Now here's some more SketchUp fun:

Sketchup drawings on Flickr
SketchUp's video tutorial
Sketchup models gallery
Sketchup one of the coolest products at MacWorld
Sketchup drawings on Google Image Search
Directory of Google Earth placemarks, some made with Sketchup

Google Galaxy Starts with Mars

2006-03-13T02:03:00.000-05:00

Google is one step closer to announcing a Google Galaxy (Universe/Solar System) product. Today Google introduced Google Mars, its Maps-like exploration of the surface of Mars. (This is likely an extension of Keyhole's Mars exploration that was quietly forgotten once Google acquired the company.)

But forget Earth or Mars, Google is going to the outer limits! Between July 19 and 21, 2005, Google, Inc. registered the .com/net/org/info domains for Google's name plus all of the planets and words like galaxy, universe, and solar system:

Planets:
GoogleMercury .com .net .org .info
GoogleVenus .com .net .org .info
GoogleEarth .com .net .org .info (already released of course)
GoogleMars .net .org .info (.com currently owned by another party)
GoogleJupiter .com .net. org . info
GoogleSaturn .com .net .org .info
GoogleUranus .com .net .org .info
GoogleNeptune .com .net .org .info
GooglePluto .com .net .org .info

Possible Project Names:
GoogleGalaxy .com .net .org .info
GoogleGalactic .com .net .org .info
GoogleUniverse .net .org .info (.com currently owned by another party)
GoogleSatellite .com .net .org .info (created earlier on 4/08/05)
GoogleSolarSystem .com .net .org .info

I have been sitting on this knowledge for awhile, and now it pays off with the release of Google Mars, making it almost certain that Google Galaxy (or some similar project that lets you flyover and explore all of the planets) is in the works. A few other things have tipped us off..

It is no coincidence that on July 20, 2005, one day after registering these domain names, Google released its Google Moon product (with moon-is-cheese joke) as a quirky yet sneaky foreshadowing to its coming project...

Apparently Google Mars was made in collaboration with NASA (view the flyover video that marries all the info), so Google's announced partnership with NASA last September must be yet another clue to what is coming....

Earth, Moon, Mars, and what next? Most certainly, the Universe!

[Digg this]

Google's Writely: An Inside Look

2006-03-12T22:10:00.000-05:00

Google's acquisition of Writely has been widely speculated to be its sharpest bite yet at the Microsoft Office suite. With signups closed until Google re-releases the app, it will be awhile before most people can test the program's functionality. To get your mouths watering, here's a rundown of Writely's features and performance (with some appropriate comparisons to Microsoft Word and a few speculations on where Google is going with this).

Click for a full-size screenshot of my document in the Writely interface.

Overall Impression:
Writely is a powerful editor for online documents. I say online documents because Writely is primarily for documents that will be created, edited, presented, and shared via the web. Microsoft Word, on the other hand was designed for print materials (think measurement toolbars, header/footer layouts, paper size controls, label/envelope support, etc). Writers who create printable materials like pamphlets, college essays, and and portfolios will still require the advanced print editing features in software like Word. But webby types will enjoy the simplified, web-ready documents that can be created, shared, and filed in an instant. In sum, Writely takes some hints from Microsoft Word, subtracts some of its advanced print features, and then adds some exciting web capabilities to inhabit its new niche in word processing.

Test Documents:

In Writely, you can export your document to the following formats: HTML, Rich Text Format, Word doc, OpenOffice doc, PDF, and posts in supported blog clients. Below are links to Writely's exports of my test document in some of these formats (all open in a new window).

HTML (on Writely's server)
Word doc
PDF

I gave Writely a rather detailed layout to work with, and I am impressed with the way it was able to port these styles to the various document types. The line spacing and other typographic elements are off (stressing again that Writely is not for designing print documents), but legibility is retained across platforms.

Document Editing:

When creating a document, you can instantly add collaborators.

You then type directly into the Writely interface to create your document. Traditional text styling features like bold, italics, underline, sub/superscripts, text colors, highlights, left/right/center/justify, and ordered and unordered lists are all available. You can also insert tables, drag and drop images, and cut and paste text from other documents.

Here are screenshots of the expanded toolbar menu items:

Export/save/copy/or subscribe to RSS. A functional and powerful file menu.

The future is tagging...tagging everything. Writely's document tags are user created and accessible only to the users that create them--e.g. you won't see tags for "motorcycles" or "avocado growth report" if you haven't created them.

The table insertion tool is HTML-based rather than "document-based" as in MS Word. You get to specify rows/cols but also padding and cell spacing. Writely's link insertion lets you add links to other Writely documents, URL's, email addresses, and bookmarks.

Bookmarks are Writely's name for HTML's page anchors. You can insert bookmarks at any point in the document and then create links to those anchors via the hyperlink tool. Easy referencing within the same document, done web-style.

You can apply text classes like HTML's H1, H2, H3, block quote styles or erase formatting altogether. Line-spacing works well but is only applicable to the document as a whole rather than highlighted sections of a document.

The pre-selected fonts are for the most part websafe, familiar, and easy to read onscreen. It just sucks that Writely even bothers to provide Comic Sans.

No customized 100 pt headings here. Writely chose font sizes that work with the web.

Basically, Writely gives you control over most text styling elements that you would use when creating a classy HTML doc, except for link colors, page or div background colors, complicated mouseover effects (tooltips are editable though), and direct insertion of video or other non-image file types.

Spell check and an editable dictionary are included as well: Writely uses Word's squiggly red lines to indicate mistakes. No sign of grammar help, though.

And for those who must be brief, Writely also provides the standard word count.

Writely is still working on advanced features (like find and replace) and I expect more tools on par with Word's functionality to crop up over time.

Document Organization:

Writely's most surprising bonus features are its support of tagging for documents and storage and prioritizing similar to the Gmail system. Each document can receive single or multiple user-created tags. When sifting through Writely files, you can view active documents, starred documents, documents pertaining to a single tag, and all documents at once. You can then copy/edit/delete/re-tag from there. Last edited dates are also given for each document. The interface is intuitive and responds instantly to your changes.

Document Sharing:

In addition to saving your document to various formats, you can choose to make documents public, private, or shareable amongst invited email addresses.

Users whom you invite will have access to that specific document as well as to their own Writely interface for creating new documents. Commenting is provided (see my test document) to identify changes and to track suggestions between users. (Comments are lost, however, if you export the doc to Word format.) You can also view a document's revision history in a list of its saved versions, making it easy to revert to previous versions.

Finally, Writely lets you track changes to documents via associated RSS feeds (with some warnings about privacy of course). While it seems an obvious step for those accustomed to using RSS feeds, it's an astonishly new concept in the creation of documents which are seldom seen as "evolving" but rather seen as being in draft mode until they are saved /printed in final, fixed copy. When our feedreaders are full of document change feeds that require our constant monitoring, we'll hate this feature, but for now it's innovative.

Document Accessiblity:

Don't forget that Writely lets you upload files, including Word docs for editing within the Writely interface. After uploading a few folders of Word docs, you have instant access to all of your work online in an interface that both supports Word and exports (most of) your changes back into that format for office printing.

While it may seem to have fewer features than Word, Writely does allow you to access documents from anywhere. This is a natural extension of web-based content creators like MT and WordPress which have made us accustomed to composing and publishing strictly on the web. Certainly this is also the future of workplace document creation and accessibility as well.

What Writely Is Not:

Writely is not a fully-featured, traditional desktop publishing program. It does not provide features like those in Word and InDesign that let you create custom paper sizes, apply multi-page layouts, design your own greeting cards, or import custom font families.

Writely is not (yet) a term paper machine. There is no support for automatically updating footnotes, automatically updating tables of contents, or page numbering for that matter. It's just not that kind of app at this point.

Where Google's Writely is Going:

The major hypothesis is that Writely will be the MS Word of Google's predicted office suite. While this is surfactorily correct (in all likelihood), it ignores the fact that Google is probably not trying to create the next great word processor. Google is more probably trying to create the next great text engine that we haven't yet seen: a fully featured, strongly robust, always portable, platform-independent way of creating documents. We're talking reports that are written entirely online, edited seamlessly by multiple authors, saved securely on failsafe servers (GDrive anyone?), viewable on all machines, and instantly integrative with websites and email. (Connecting the Writely product to Gmail, Calendar, Google Groups, the hoped for GDrive, etc. is most certainly a long term goal for the project.) In sum, we shouldn't be too quick to call Google's Writely the next MS Word. It should be recognized for what it is, a new kind of document creation.

Lesser discussed is Writely's potential effect on Blogger (and Google Pages). I wrote recently on things that Blogger can do to get back in the game, and integration with Writely would be a quick way for Google to assess those shortcomings. Writely already supports posting to Blogger, Google has already released an MS Word extension for posting from Word to Blogger, so why not stronger, more streamlined integration between the eventual Writely project and Blogger? We just may see it.

As for "monetizing" the Google office suite, Writely provides no immediate answers. The service is currently free though it could eventually charge monthly/annual access/storage fees (not Google's style though). Google's tried and true advertising revenue model probably would not fit well here just as it does not with Blogger. Users won't want ads slapped at the top of their content and they probably will not be seeing ads in a document-creation interface. That doesn't mean users can't opt-in and put Google ads on their Writely documents if they wish. That is, after all, exactly the way that Blogger blogs are voluntarily monetized and that some books on Google's Book Search are monetized. How Google gets its money back with Writely (and I have no doubt it will, cleverly and many times over), we'll just have to wait and see.

Google Newsbites 3/10/06

2006-03-10T11:44:00.000-05:00

Writely goes to Google, read more: Official Google Blog, Writely FAQ, Writely Blog: Word 2007, get on your knees and suck it

Google's testing of related content is open to beta testers--see an implementation of the related content scriptlet on this blog, verdict: looks like Chitika

Camphone picks of the Googleplex (including Eric Schmidt's office), warning: many images being blocked by ImageShack's lame bandwidth policy

Search makes people rich--see where they live

Designing Flash pages so Google will index them

Squash thinks Google Lighthouse is file management system

Fuzzy referral URL evidence that Google might be buying Sun Microsystems

Seems like Yahoo is updating del.icio.us

Why Brazil loves Orkut

India getting blurred out on Google Earth

Yahoo Leaked Google Calendar Pics to TechCrunch

2006-03-08T17:58:00.000-05:00

Update: Mike Arrington has said he did not get CL2 screenshots from Yahoo, updated article is here.

Always with the steamiest, most scintillating stories, Valleywag reveals that TechCrunch's screenshots of Google Calendar (CL2) came from Yahoo.

Apparently a participant in Google's Early Tester program gave login info to a Yahoo contact who then leaked the CL2 screenshots and information to Michael Arrington of TechCrunch (who has many friends at Yahoo). To Yahoo's credit, it did alert Google to the leak of the login info, and Google was able to cancel the turncoat tester account. Good deeds aside, Yahoo probably took copious notes and made all kinds of screenshots that will enable it to make Yahoo Calendar evenly competitive with CL2 the day it is released.

Of course, we're now struck with questions:

Has Yahoo had access to all of Google's Early Tester programs? If so, for how much of Google's product history? Arrington says that 200 users are testing CL2, but I get the impression that the Early Tester program is larger than that number. CL2 was, however, listed on the Tester links page that was turned up a few weeks ago, making it seem like all testers must have been aware of CL2's availability.

Also, how much can we expect that Google gleans from its "spies" in Yahoo's beta programs? The "sameness" of releases across the major search engines (maps programs, calendar programs, video search, fully featured webmail, blog and social community spaces) starts to make you wonder if they're not all working off a commonly shared beta list and just releasing products at different times and levels of completion.

Regardless, this Google > Yahoo > TechCrunch slip reveals that much is to be learned by paying close attention to all available routes to information! Behold the power of company secrets, competitive strategy, and fast moving technology.