Web pages can use a variety of different character encodings, like ASCII, Latin-1, or Windows 1252 or Unicode. Most encodings can only represent a few [...]]]> Unicode nearing 50% of the web: “About 18 months ago, we published a graph showing that Unicode on the web had just exceeded all other encodings of text on the web. The growth since then has been even more dramatic.

Web pages can use a variety of different character encodings, like ASCII, Latin-1, or Windows 1252 or Unicode. Most encodings can only represent a few languages, but Unicode can represent thousands: from Arabic to Chinese to Zulu. We have long used Unicode as the internal format for all the text we search: any other encoding is first converted to Unicode for processing.

This graph is from Google internal data, based on our indexing of web pages, and thus may vary somewhat from what other search engines find. However, the trends are pretty clear, and the continued rise in use of Unicode makes it even easier to do the processing for the many languages that we cover.

Searching for ‘nancials’?
Unicode is growing both in usage and in character coverage. We recently upgraded to the latest version of Unicode, version 5.2 (via ICU and CLDR). This adds over 6,600 new characters: some of mostly academic interest, such as Egyptian Hieroglyphs, but many others for living languages.

We’re constantly improving our handling of existing characters. For example, the characters ‘fi’ can either be represented as two characters (‘f’ and ‘i’), or a special display form ‘fi’. A Google search for [financials] or [office] used to not see these as equivalent — to the software they would just look like *nancials and of*ce. There are thousands of characters like this, and they occur in surprisingly many pages on the web, especially generated PDF documents.

But no longer — after extensive testing, we just recently turned on support for these and thousands of other characters; your searches will now also find these documents. Further steps in our mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

And we’re angling for a party when Unicode hits 50%!

Posted by Mark Davis, Senior International Software Architect

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(Via Official Google Blog: Network effects: Introducing the Google Apps ….)

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(Via Wired News.)

This National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIPP) briefing features the project Memento, presented by Herbert Van de Sompel of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Michael Nelson from Old Dominion University.

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(Via Library of Congress – Subscriptions.)

(Via Wired News.)

Google Voice is about giving you more control over your communications, through dozens of features — ranging from call screening to voicemail transcription to the ability to send and receive SMS by email.

While we’ve heard from users that they love our growing list of features, we’re conscious of the fact that Google Voice can seem overwhelming [...]]]> Google Voice, explained: “

Google Voice is about giving you more control over your communications, through dozens of features — ranging from call screening to voicemail transcription to the ability to send and receive SMS by email.

While we’ve heard from users that they love our growing list of features, we’re conscious of the fact that Google Voice can seem overwhelming to people trying it for the first time.

So we’ve created a short video that gives an overview of what Google Voice can do.

In addition, we’ve created a set of short videos that dive into more detail about ten features of Google Voice:

1. Voicemail transcription
2. One number
3. Personalized greetings
4. International calling
5. SMS to email
6. Share voicemails
7. Block callers
8. Screen callers
9. Mobile app
10. Conference calls

The videos show why you might want to use each feature and basic instructions for getting started. And each video focuses on just one topic so you can learn about the features that matter to you.

Finally, we just launched our own YouTube channel at youtube.com/googlevoice. You can view all of the videos mentioned above in a custom video gadget we built for this channel, which will help you keep track of which videos you’ve already watched.

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(Via Official Google Blog: Network effects: Introducing the Google Apps ….)

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been busy adding new functionality to make communicating and sharing with Google Apps easier than ever, whether you use Google Apps [...]]]> Google Apps highlights – 2/19/2010: “This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label ‘Google Apps highlights‘ and subscribe to the series. – Ed.

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been busy adding new functionality to make communicating and sharing with Google Apps easier than ever, whether you use Google Apps for work, for school or at home.

Web clipboard for Google Docs
As more and more people are getting work done in the cloud with Google Docs, a common stumbling block has been copying and pasting formatted content between documents, spreadsheets and presentations. On Wednesday we made this a whole lot easier with a web clipboard for Google Docs. Just highlight what you want to copy, select from the web clipboard menu, move to your other Google Docs window and choose what you want to paste from the web clipboard menu. Your pasted content will retain its original formatting so you don’t have to spend time reformatting.

New saving buttons in Google Docs
One of the most frustrating things about using traditional software is losing your work if something unexpected happens before you remember to save. Google Docs helps solve this problem by frequently saving your latest changes automatically. Still, we’ve heard from people that they want that extra reassurance that autosave is happening, and to be able to manually save their work more easily. New saving buttons in Google Docs do just that. The buttons let you know when your document is fully saved, in the process of being autosaved or has unsaved changes that haven’t been picked up by autosave yet. Now, if there are unsaved changes the ‘Save now’ button is clickable.

Google Buzz
Last week we launched Google Buzz, a new way to start conversations about things you find interesting, like photos, videos, webpages or whatever might be on your mind. Buzz lets you share right from Gmail, or from your mobile phone. You can connect other sites you use like Twitter, Picasa, and Google Reader, and you can post buzz privately or publicly. Since we released Google Buzz, we quickly made a number of improvements based on input from users, and we’re committed to keep improving it. Individuals can use Google Buzz now, and we plan to make it available to businesses and universities using Google Apps within a few months.

Google Apps Script for Google Sites
Google Apps Script lets you create programmatic interactions between a whole variety of Google services including contacts, calendars, email, finance data, spreadsheets and more. Businesses often use scripts to automate repetitive processes. Last week, we added Google Sites to the list of products that you can control with scripts. Now, instead of manually updating the content in a site, you can use Google Apps Script to automatically populate pages in your site with calendar data, contact information and data from the other services that work with Google Apps Script. Scripts can even add attachments and be used to update the sharing preferences for your site.

Who’s gone Google?
With 3,500 employees, Lincoln Property Company is one of the largest property management firms in the United States. Recently, Lincoln Property made the decision to switch to Google Apps from their complex and costly Novell Groupwise email infrastructure. Not only will they save an estimated $200,000 per year, they’ll finally be able to equip every single employee with email, instant messaging and calendars — not just the 950 desk-based workers who previously had email access.

The Google Apps train keeps rolling in the education space as well. Seven million students around the world are now using Google Apps at school! DePauw University and Davenport University are just a couple of the most recent schools to switch to Google Apps.

Hope you’re enjoying the latest round of new capabilities, whether you’re using Google Apps with friends and family, with work colleagues or with classmates. For details and the latest news in this area, check out the Google Apps Blog.

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(Via Official Google Blog: Network effects: Introducing the Google Apps ….)

Buyers of the Linux and UNIX versions of FAST’s Enterprise Search Platform (ESP) got some bad news the other day: It’ll now be necessary to switch to a Windows server platform, or else move to some other product for enterprise search.

Microsoft Corporation, which as you may recall acquired FAST two years ago for $1.2 billion, has confirmed it [...]]]> Microsoft leaves Linux-based FAST customers stranded: “

Buyers of the Linux and UNIX versions of FAST’s Enterprise Search Platform (ESP) got some bad news the other day: It’ll now be necessary to switch to a Windows server platform, or else move to some other product for enterprise search.

Microsoft Corporation, which as you may recall acquired FAST two years ago for $1.2 billion, has confirmed it will stop development of FAST’s ESP core on Linux and Unix after the release of SharePoint 2010 later this year. Microsoft has in effect said it will now build its FAST search engine only for Windows.

FAST chief technology officer Bjørn Olstad hinted there will be an upgrade program to move customers to a hosted search service or FAST on Windows. He also said Microsoft will support ESP 5.3 throughout its product lifecycle of five years mainstream support and five years extended support. (Extended support for ESP 5.3 will end on July 16, 2018.)

We suspect that some FAST customers will use this as an opportunity to look at OS-neutral search solutions, of which there are many. Let’s put it this way, it would be surprising if FAST’s Linux customers did not look for alternatives to FAST at this point, because presumably these customers chose Linux for well-considered reasons (most likely involving security or performance) in the first place.  They wont be easily persuaded to invest in Windows servers now if that was not the original plan.

It’s not just a matter of swapping out boxes. It’s also a matter of having appropriately trained personnel in place to set up and administer a Windows-server cluster instead of a Linux one — and accepting the security trade-offs that come with moving from Linux to Windows. That’s not something a Linux customer relishes thinking about.

For more on FAST and your alternatives, consider our Search and Information Access Research.  Well keep our subscribers informed of developments as soon as we learn about them.
 

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(Via CMS Watch Trends and Features.)

What merchants don’t know about the technical side of protecting customer data can be costly.

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) describes 12 system and procedural requirements for securing customer credit card data that is transmitted, processed, or stored by an online merchant.

In order to accept credit cards as a form of online payment, merchants [...]]]> The Technical Side of PCI DSS: “

What merchants don’t know about the technical side of protecting customer data can be costly.

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) describes 12 system and procedural requirements for securing customer credit card data that is transmitted, processed, or stored by an online merchant.

In order to accept credit cards as a form of online payment, merchants are expected to comply with the PCI DSS standard. In an effort to meet this requirement, online stores dutifully encrypt data transmissions with a secure socket layer (SSL) or even extended validation SSL, which is great, and implement a policy of not storing credit card data, which is also important. What is often overlooked, however, is that an online store is res…

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(Via Practical eCommerce Articles.)

Persuasion Architecture, developed by conversion optimization gurus Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg, is a persona-based approach to marketing. If you know a customer’s ‘buying modality’ (Competitive, Spontaneous, Methodical or Humanistic), you can tailor your design, copy and direct marketing to best persuade that type of personality.

It would be ideal to segment an email list by personality type. You can apply [...]]]> Applying Persuasion to Email Creative: “

Persuasion Architecture, developed by conversion optimization gurus Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg, is a persona-based approach to marketing. If you know a customer’s ‘buying modality’ (Competitive, Spontaneous, Methodical or Humanistic), you can tailor your design, copy and direct marketing to best persuade that type of personality.

It would be ideal to segment an email list by personality type. You can apply segmentation rules to on-site behavior, such as what the customer chooses to sort category results by. For example, if a customer chooses to see the newest or most expensive items first, he or she may be a ‘Competitive.’ If the customer is logged in with an account, you may flag that customer as ‘Competitive’ and send future promotional emails for the category accordingly.

Sometimes you simply have no information on a customer’s intent or personality type. Okay, let’s be honest – it’s most of the time. Is there a ‘shotgun’ method to marketing that might cover the 4 buying modalities? Crutchfield shows you it’s possible:

Let’s look at how this email campaign appeals to each personality type:

Competitive Customers

• Like to be the first to own a product – respond to new items, featured or best-sellers
• Interested in facts and summaries – without clicking

Crutchfield explains why the items are featured, identifying which is the New Arrival, the Top Seller, the Featured markdown and the Customer Favorite. Great, that saves the competitive time.

However, I think it could be a bit more persuasive. New Arrival, so what? If I’m competitive, I want to know what about owning this model will make me the coolest kid on my block – I’d like to see a special feature about it that the older stock doesn’t have. I believe every pick could use a one or two bullet point summary to get more info before the click.

Spontaneous Customers

• Interested in what other people bought
• Respond to sales, discounts, limited stock and time-limited offers (like day-only sales)
• Respond to free overnight shipping (I can have it tomorrow!)
• Interested in ‘how many’ reviews there are

This entire email is perfect for a spontaneous person who is more likely to make an impulse purchase than other types. To aid the decision making for the spontaneous shopper (if he or she is price sensitive or trusts top rated picks, for example) Crutchfield has made it easy to make a fast decision. Crutchfield creates excitement around the different picks, clearly showing the markdowns and star ratings.

Adding the number of reviews would help to instill trust for all buyer types (as Andy Beal reminds us in Radically Transparent, a 4.5 star rating for 300 reviews is more positive and trustworthy than a 5 star average with 2 reviews).

If Crutchfield upped the ante here and offer free overnight shipping, that would make it extra persuasive to the spontaneous.

Methodical Customers

• Like product details, very thorough in researching a purchase
• Like side-by-side product comparison to make a rational decision
• Trust expert reviews – videos are especially helpful
• May be skeptical of contests, free shipping and returns – what’s the catch? Will read the fine print every time.

The links to the buyer guides and other learning materials on the side are great for methodicals, who want to educate themselves before purchasing anything. The quick links to read reviews are great, because methodicals like me often read the majority of them.

For the product picks, classifying why a model was picked is brilliant. Methodicals lean towards skepticism, so clarifying that one was picked because of a sale vs. a new arrival vs. a customer favorite helps them trust your offers. Methodicals can also see the sale price, original price and dollar savings clearly.

Crutchfield could do even better by replacing the ‘Featured Product’ with ‘Expert Pick’ or ‘Staff Pick.’ ‘Featured’ is a vague adjective. It’s better to be specific about why something is featured, and there are no expert picks in this email, which methodicals would like to see.

Humansitic Customers

• Cares what others have to say
• Appreciates live chat support (or telephone service)

Humanistic shoppers will appreciate the star ratings, Customer Favorite and the ‘Call us for One on One Advice’ messaging with shiny, happy people.

All-in-all, Crutchfield’s is an excellent example of selling to different types of shoppers in one email, without cluttering the creative. Hat tip to Chad White from the Retail Email Blog where I discovered this email.

And don’t forget, persuasion applies to every part of your site and marketing program. Are you optimizing your customer reviews and email subject lines for different buying modalities?

For more information on Persuasion Architecture, see the Eisenberg’s Waiting for Your Cat to Bark.

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(Via Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog.)