Yesterday Google registered several variations of the domain “googlestreetview.com” — normally I would think the feature would be months away, but given Where 2.0 starts on Tuesday, it will likely be available (or at least announced) by the end of the month. This functionality is likely in addition to the 3D buildings they are [...]

Google Chris Wetherell posted about the birth of Google Reader…
At Google one day, like every day, I was really busy.
Turns out that with Jason Shellen that wasn’t really much of a deterrent. “Why don’t you make an Atom parser in Javascript?”, he asked.
Which, for the non-geeks, is his asking me to make something that turns something into something else which could be used to represent data that was basically about

Not able to attend the Google Developer Day on May 31? No problem, there will be a live webcast at the time of the event and Google will record the video and host it on YouTube so you can attend the Developer Day just as much as the 5,000 developers who will be attending the sessions in 10 different Google office locations worldwide.
read: Schedule of the session at Googleplex

To celebrate the one year anniversary of the launch of click-to-play video ads, Google today added three more formats of click-to-play video ads to AdSense. The new formats for these video ads are the 728×90 Leaderboard, the 120×600 Skyscraper, and the 160×600 Wide Skyscraper.
Unlike the previous formats that filled the whole ad unit with the video, the video in the new formats take only about 1/6 to 1/7 of the ad unit’s siz

Google earlier this month challenged eBay’s netball team after an email from the eBay netball team with “we are the champions”-type statements landed in their inbox. Not as prepared and organized as the eBay netball team, Google’s “underdog” team lost the game as anticipated. (Score is 23 to 17) This reminds me “Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.”
However, that day’s real winner was

Google isn’t shy about it’s stance on the environment — they have a huge array of solar panels that provide some energy at the Googleplex, a shuttle that transports employees to and from work, powered by biodiesel, and a public statement on google.org.
Climate Change: mitigate the effect of climate change on the poor by reducing [...]

Technorati, a blog search engine in search for its own meaning – and possibly hoping to get acquired in one of those crazy multi-billion bucks deals – redesigns every couple of months. The latest redesign (which was down for me yesterday, so I’m posting with some delay; today, it’s only partly down) is found at the end of the gallery below, showcasing past Technorati designs throughout the years. In the latest relaunch, t

Xiaowan in the forum created a couple of mockups to propose a way for Gmail to handle multiple email addresses of yours, with a synchronized signature for each. What do you all think? [By Philipp Lenssen | Original post][Advertisement] Google books at eBay: background info on Google, AdWords, AdSense, Blogger and more…   [Advertise here]

Fascinating: a computer program analyzes a person’s lip movement in a silent movie (here: Hitler filmed by Eva Braun), matches the frames to a large library of pronounced words to find out what was being said, and then plays back the sound via a computer generated voice. This way, fully automated, a silent film turns into a film with speech, and historical archives reveal new information. This technology was foreshadowed in Kubrick’

How to make a balloon penguin… Sclipo is a nice video site for people to show off their skills. The good thing is that you can learn a bit from it too. Sclipo, as well as 5min.com – another interesting video tutorial site – were both contestants in the recent European Startup 2.0 competition (I was also “sitting” in the jury – Sclipo won, and 5min.com came in second yesterday). Another way to find instructional vi

There has been SMS support in Google Calendar for a long time now, but a complete mobile interface was only available if you wanted to use a third party project. Now you can get your calendar on your phone straight from the source by pointing your phone to http://calendar.google.com. [images from Google Blogoscoped under a [...]

Yeh! Finally, there’s a way to “Avoid highways” on Google Maps! To activate the feature, you will just need to click on the “Avoid highways” checkbox on the left panel where it displays your driving directions, if there’s any highways involved.

This is a true story (at least that’s what Google says)…
This lady’s husband messed up their new washer because he forgot to take out the ink from his pocket. Now this lady said that she’s furious and was to kill her husband. Thanks to Google, she found a way to clean the washer and save her marriage.
That’s rid.iculo.us and h.ilario.us. It’s worse than MadTV. If she would kill her husband for such small th

Jacobsd at the Google Blogoscoped forum posted some photos of the “new” YouTube video player. He said that the “new player allows you to pick from a bunch of video recommendations and then loads those videos within the same player instead of sending you to YouTube” when the player is embedded on a web page.
I am not seeing it, so I can’t tell you how it feels like, but it’s looks very cool, very iTune-ish to m

Google Talk has finally got some cuter and more colorfull smileys. Well, at least for the Google Talk Gadget for now, but I am pretty sure that they will add to desktop version of Google Talk soon. Just as the oldie but goodie smileys on Google Chat, the smileys on the new sets are also animated.
I love the smiley. LOL

You can now choose from a wider range of emoticons in the Google Talk gadget, the Flash-based gadget launchable in a new browser window, or embeddable on iGoogle and elsewhere. Just click the smiley picker at the bottom right of the Google Talk gadget to get an impression of what’s available now (there’s 35 smileys and icons all in all, from devil to broken heart to crying and shock). Google offers three basic sets: animated yellow

I’m curious what interesting searches you have done with Google’s recently launched timeline operator, part of Google Experimental. To recall, adding view:timeline to any search query will now show a timeline view of Google results (snippets are broken down into sequentially listed dates; the view:map operator on the other hand presents results on a map). On a side-note, it might be revealing to see a combination of Google’s

Google Maps had a slight interface update today. If you are a regular Google Maps user, you will find that Google has moved the Search Result and My Maps tab above the map, instead of left of the map.
I like the new design overall, but in my opinion, the fade ins/outs when opening and closing the left panel should be eliminated. One is because it takes time and two it doesn’t move smoothly when in action.

Google just released a small calendar application specifically tailored to mobile phones. Just point your browser to calendar.google.com as usual and you’ll get a list presenting the upcoming events, if any. You can also “quick add” new events from your phone. Neat & useful! [Via Google Blog.] [By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments][Advertisement] Google books at eBay: background info on Google, AdWords, AdSense, B

Michael Arrington of Tech Crunch has the scoop on a deal that people have been speculating about for over a week — sources close to talks say that Google is about to fork out $100 million dollars for Feedburner.
Rumors about Google acquiring RSS management company Feedburner from last week, started by ex-TechCrunch UK editor Sam [...]

According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, you’re now not allowed anymore to advertise term-paper and essay-writing services with Google AdWords. These services “join prostitutes, firearms dealers, and hacking sites in Google’s forbidden-advertising zone,” as The Chronicle puts it. If that’s the case, the change is apparently not live yet (or old campaigns will continue to run for a time), as the term-paper servic

Roger Browne in the forum points out the following passage from the Google Terms of Service (US): <<Your use of Google’s … web sites … is subject to the terms of a legal agreement between you and Google … You may not use the Services and may not accept the Terms if … you are not of legal age to form a binding contract with Google>> Roger comments, “Probably every schoolchild in the developed world is breaking Google&

Google was recently reported to correct the following search queries via their “did you mean?” functionality: she invented->Did you mean: he invented
she scored->Did you mean: he scored
she instructed->Did you mean: he instructed
she saved->Did you mean: he saved
she discovered->Did you mean: he discovered
she golfed->Did you mean: he golfed
(and more…) This spellchecking behavior (which is automated, and pro

I’ve asked Google some questions in regards to their image search engine. Here are the answers by Radhika Malpani, Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google.   Google is confident they have the best web search, if you apply quality metrics through testing. Are you also confident you have the industry’s best image search engine too… and if so, why? Yes. To create the best image search engine, we focus on comprehensiveness, r

Gmail increased their permitted file size for attachments from 10 MB to 20 MB.
However, “the precise amount allowable will depend on the attachment,” the Gmail help says (wonder what that means). The overall Gmail storage capability in the meantime is at 2856 MB, constantly rising. Ongoing comments [Thanks Sohil!] [By Philipp Lenssen | Original post][Advertisement] Google books at eBay: background info on Google, AdWords

The internet isn’t only in English, though it may seem like that at times for people who natively speak other languages. Well, Google just launched a new feature in Google Translate that unleashes the power of machine translation on search results. All of a sudden the web got really big for many people around the [...]

Don’t speak Spanish but looking for search results in Spanish? No problem, go to Google Translate, translate the query, and go back to Google and do the search. Hmm, do you notice that there are a lot of back and forth going on? Now, with the new feature on Google Translate, you can do it in less steps.
Go to Google Translate, click on the Search Results tab, type in your query and choose your language and the language you want the results

The archived video of Google’s Searchology press conference from May 16th is live now, in case you missed this event. The webcast features Craig Silverstein, Ben Gomes, Kerry Rodden, Udi Manber, and Marissa Mayer, and (after a couple of ads) starts off with an interesting technological account of the early days of Google. [By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments][Advertisement] Google books at eBay: background info on Google, AdWord

Eww, Google says that microwaved babies are spicy… Yuck, it sickens me…
I bet Google didn’t expect that coming with their labels of Hotness in the new Google Trends.
[via Flickr]

As promised at the recent Searchology event (and mentioned here earlier), Google’s behind-the-scenes translation search engine is live now. For example, you can search for how are you doing, and set your “search” language as English, and the preferred “find” language as German. Now, Google will go ahead and search for the German translation of “how are you doing,” and present you with German-origin search results t

Google now allows you to convert Google Gadgets to subscribed links as part of Google Co-op. One of the more interesting result widgets is the translator; once subscribed to, it’s triggered by entering e.g. translate “i love you” into french in Google web search. Other gadgets, as Micro Persuasion’s Steve Rubel points out, include a clock and calendar, a traffic map, and weather info. “Given the size of the Google

Michael Arrigington of TechCrunch said that the rumors about Google acquiring FeedBurner “are accurate and are now confirmed according to a source close to the deal.” If this is true, then the acquisition will cost Google $100 million in cash. That would be about $236 per publisher.
If the deal is for real, I think Google is probably interested more in FeedBurner’s advertising program than its technology.

Google to license Stanford’s Stanley tech, enhance maps - Engadget
Well, Google is never one to lie back and take it from the Redmond crew, so it’s struck a deal with Stanford to license the sensing technology behind 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge winner Stanley to improve their maps.
Google Survey on Google Earth - GEarthBlog
Google is looking to conduct “User Experience Research” involving Google Earth. Fill out this survey

Need to dig up some information from a centuries-old text on ayurvedic medicine? Soon you’ll be able to do so from the comfort of your living room. Google has agreed to index and digitize 800,000 texts stored at the University of Mysore in India as part of its attempt to broaden the Google Book Search program, according to the Indo-Asian News Service.

SQ89 in the forum posted a screenshot of a presentation showing a dialpad in Google Talk, pondering if we can expect “regular phone support in Google Talk soon.”
[Thanks SQ89 and Tony!] [By Philipp Lenssen | Original post][Advertisement] Google books at eBay: background info on Google, AdWords, AdSense, Blogger and more…   [Advertise here]

Adam Lashinsky at a CNN blog last week reports that Google Video’s direct, Jennifer Feikin, left Google. “The writing was on the wall for this one since the moment last October that Google agreed to buy YouTube,” Adam argues, adding that YouTube “thoroughly vanquished Google Video, an also-ran product in terms of traffic.” (An interesting comparison: Google internally once claimed Google Video has 50% of the world�

A user typed “digg.xom” instead of “digg.com” and ends up on this Google.com-hosted page… David Ulevitch of the OpenDNS blog describes a piece of software, allegededly pre-installed on Dell computers in a Google/ Dell partnership, which shows a very special kind of (Google-hosted) results page to users who mistype a domain. This page’s top results are almost exclusively Google-powered ads – disclosed, but bi

Eliezer Yudkowsky from the Singularity Institute is being interviewed. He speaks on the subject of the technological singularity – when artificial intelligence advanced to the point it can modify and improve itself, potentially accelerating its acceleration, causing an explosion of intelligence. Eliezer’s basic argument is that as soon as a self-improving AI is created, its launch constraints will determine whether it will be up t

Andrew emailed this question: “What happened to the Google search engine last week, I can’t see the buttons for image and news what changed?” After we emailed back and forth, it turns out that for security reasons, JavaScript had been disabled in Andy’s browser. Without JavaScript, the corner navigation won’t load anymore (see screenshot). This seems to be a new level of inaccessibility in Google homepage designs,

Blogger Amit Agarwal released the Google AdSense Sandbox, a quick & easy tool where you enter some keywords or your URL, to then see a page full of samples of Google AdSense ads that might show for these words/ this URL. [Thanks Amit!] [By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments][Advertisement] Google books at eBay: background info on Google, AdWords, AdSense, Blogger and more…   [Advertise here]

Google-owned YouTube has launched the Sketchies (a [cheesy?] name in-tune with “Bloggies” or “Webby”). Your objective is to create a ~3-minute long sketch comedy video and upload it to YouTube by end of May. If YouTube voters as well as a selected jury like your video, your crew is then requested to uploaded yet another video in the series, and so on until you have the chance to be the final winner of the 3rd round, anno

The Financial Times yesterday said Eric Schmidt argues gathering more personal information on users is a logical extension of their mission. Eric was asked to give an outlook of what Google might look another five years from now, saying: <<We are very early in the total information we have within Google. The algorithms will get better and we will get better at personalisation. The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the que

For political reasons, Google rarely to never communicates about the way it losens or tightens its implementation of censorship control in China. But by reverse-engineering the Google black box we sometimes see traces of what’s happening. For instance, just three months ago there was no single result in a Google China image search for politicians like 胡锦涛 (China’s president Hu Jintao) or 邓小平 (Deng Xiaoping). This was esp