Computers

Today, Google is having a workshop (along with product news) on Google’s personalization services. Colin Colehour will be reporting live from the Googleplex event for us and I’ll be updating the post with new info as it comes in. Speakers will include Marissa Mayer and Sepandar Kamvar. (Note: Colin worked as a contractor for the Google Partner Solutions organization for 1 year; he’s currently working on personal projects from home.)

Overview:

1. Marissa Mayer on iGoogle
2. Sep Kamvar on personalization, and an announcement of personalized location results
3. Jessica Ewing: iGoogle fastest growing product at Google in 2006
4. Customizing the Google personalized homepage, and the new “iGoogle" name and logo
5. Google announces Gadget Maker
6. Google announces “My Community” feature as part of the iGoogle directory
7. Googleplex impressions

Marissa Mayer on iGoogle

After brunch, the program started at 12:00pm Mountain View time. Marissa Mayer talks about how many people want Google to be faster, and what they did to improve PageRank calcuations.

Marissa says the Google Personalized Homepage was thought up in 2004. The original mockup had a logo of “iGoogle” (and the URL for the service – google.com/ig – makes everyone think the product name is Google IG.) But Google decided they really wanted the personalized homepage to be a feature, not a product. Hence, it doesn’t have a particular name until today. And while Marissa was calling it “iGoogle,” its actual codename was “Mockingbird.” At the end of this brief excursion, a new “iGoogle” logo is seen on the wall...

Sep Kamvar on personalization, and an announcement of personalized location results

Sepandar Kamvar (pictured) talks about Google’s personalization efforts. Why does Google invest in a “personal Google” now? Sep says it’s because of recent trends in content on the web, and recent technological advances in search algorithms. He suggests that Google wants to compute PageRank for every single person, so to speak. Sep explains that Google thinks of personalization in 3 parts:

• Search Your own stuff (like Google Desktop Search, Web History)
• Traditional (Pull) Search
• Push Search (like recommendations, iGoogle/ personalized homepage)

Still, Sep says they want to put the user in charge. For instance, Google makes personalization optional, Sep says, and you can pause the Web History feature (or remove specific items from the history). He goes on to mention that you can also export your Web History as RSS feed, giving the user more control over their data.

Sep continues with the classic disambiguation problem: a user is searching for “jaguar,” which could mean either the car, or the animal (or even the operating system). Google, of course, wants to show the user what they’re really interested in; if your search history reveals you’ve been looking for a new car, then a personalized result for “jaguar” should be geared more towards cars as well. Sep emphasizes that users should be able to find what they’re looking for without having to come up with the “perfect query" for what they are searching for.

Sep illustrates Google’s personalization efforts with a query for “surfing lessons.” He is now getting results tailored to his locations; his default Google Maps location is set to where he lives, information which will be tied into his Google searches as well. To quote from a Google announcement that is handed out at the workshop:

<<Google has launched location-based personalized search results. For those users who have provided a default location in Google Maps, Google will personalize results based on that location. For example, if a user has entered a default location into Google Maps and types in “library”, the results will bring up the user’s local library.>>

Jessica Ewing: iGoogle fastest growing product at Google in 2006

Now, Jessica Ewing – product manager of the Google Personalized Homepage program – is speaking. The technology of AJAX, which allows fluent page updates & client-server data exchange without having to reload a page, is one reason why Google has entered the customizable concept of Personalized Homepages, Jessica says. She goes on to say that content is changing on the web, and traditional web search wasn’t meant to answer the question “What do I want to see?”. This is one of the reasons why Personalized Homepage was created - to show you what you want to see.

Jessica goes on to mention that iGoogle will now be available in 40 countries and 26 languages*. She says that are now over 25,000 different Google gadgets that you can put on your iGoogle page, and that this was the fastest growing product at Google in 2006. Who’s developing all these gadgets? Among the developers are Wisgary Torres, whose modules receive 250,000 page views a week (I’m unsure if page view may equal just loading the Google homepage – if so, this value may be somewhat bloated). And then there’s Caleb Eggensperger, who according to Jessica developed several gadgets over the weekend. His gadgets now get “6.5 million page views a week.”

Jessica explains the concept behind the Google gadget directory. “Algorithms do a better job than we can,” she says – apparently, all gadgets in the directory are ranked algorithmically & automatically. And some gadgets don’t need to be manually picked from the directory, either. Jessica shows how Google uses IP-geolocation to optimize the gadgets displayed on iGoogle; for instance, a Harvard student might be shown feeds from Boston newspapers, based on his IP.

*These 18 new countries (15 languages) will be added to iGoogle, Google says: Turkey, Poland, Belgium (French and Dutch), Hungary, Romania, Vietnam (Vietnamese and English), Thailand (Thai and English), Ukraine, Greece, Portugal, Czech Republic, Columbia, Chile, Philippines, South Africa, Singapore, Austria, Malayasia, India (Hindi).

Customizing the Google personalized homepage, and the new “iGoogle" name and logo

Jessica Ewing says one of the first things people do when they boot up their new computer is to change the background image. These days, Google’s personalized homepage features wallpapers as well. Jessica notes that one of Google’s aims was to not make the themes too complex to view the content. At this time, themes have been adopted by 30% of the Google personalized homepage user base, Jessica says. Asked on how many user iGoogle have, Marissa Mayer says it’s “in the tens of millions.” Jessica adds that the new iGoogle logo will go live tonight... so the “Google Personalized Homepage” is now called “iGoogle.”

Google announces Gadget Maker

Jessica Ewing announces Google is going to release Gadget Maker today (claim: “no programming required”). There are 7 different types of gadgets that users can create with this tool. A new link at the bottom of your iGoogle page will allow you to access the Gadget Maker service. Jessica is showing the Framed Photo Gadget maker page (pictured above), walking us through how you would create a photo gadget. Once the gadget is created, you can invite other people to view & use the gadget, and make it publicly available for other people to view & use it.

The different types of “wizard” gadgets will cover:

1. A Photo gadget (share a series of photos with others)
2. GoogleGram gadget (allowing you to display a new greeting message to someone for every day for 7 days)
3. Daily Me gadget (which will show what you’re currently doing, as well as quotes, what’s on your mind etc.)
4. Personalized Countdown gadget
5. A Personalized List (you can e.g. publish your own top ten list with this, Google says)
6. YouTube video favorites gadget (pictured above, this gadget will let you create a YouTube channel to share)
7. A “Free Form” gadget (an “all-purpose gadget that lets you meld text and image in any way,” Google says)

If you send a gadget invite to a friend, Jessica explains, it will send them an invite email similar to a Google Docs/ Spreadsheets invite. As the gadget will be immediately shown on the invite page, the user gets the chance to play around with the gadget without having to add it directly to their iGoogle page. This is good for people that haven’t used the iGoogle product and don’t know how it works, Jessica says.

Google announces “My Community” feature as part of the iGoogle directory

Tonight at 9pm Pacific Time, Google’s Jessica Ewing says they’ll be launching a “My Community” service as part of their personalized homepage directory. When you publish gadgets to the directory, they’ll ask for your location and name, and the location data will now be used for the “My Community” section to be more localized for your area. These gadgets will be able to be posted anywhere on the web, Google says, just like the gadgets which are currently available (and Google Desktop should be able to use these as well).

Googleplex impressions

[By Colin Colehour | Original post | Comments]

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A site’s he/ she ratio is measured by counting the number of pages on the domain containing the word “he”, then searching for the number containing “she”, and then looking at the two numbers in comparison. For instance, the Google search site:cnn.com he returns about 1,160,000 results, and site:cnn.com she returns 335,000 results, meaning “he” makes up around 78% of the CNN pages containing either “he” or “she.”

What does this ratio tell us? If you think it reveals that e.g. a site with a higher “he” count is primarily consisting of or appealing to a male audience, that’s not true; for instance, both BlogHer.org as well as AskMen.com show a higher count for “she.” Whatever correlations you might discover, they’re likely not as linear. Below are a couple of examples from different sites:

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

[Advertisement] Google books at eBay: background info on Google, AdWords, AdSense, Blogger and more...   [Advertise here]

Does Google translate search queries behind the scenes to match them to AdWords? Artem Marchenko sent above screenshot and writes:

<<At the moment I am living in Finland and I need to buy some sand timers. Unfortunately I don’t really speak Finnish yet, I don’t really know how this thing is called in Finnish, so I search for literal translations of ’sand’, ’timer’ and ’clock’.

Funny thing is that while Google organic results were pretty much useless for me, the sponsored links made a lot of sense and it looks like they somehow translated my query into English before deciding which ad to show!>>

(Another possibility would be that the advertiser targets non-English words for their English campaign.)

[Thanks Artem!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

[Advertisement] Google books at eBay: background info on Google, AdWords, AdSense, Blogger and more...   [Advertise here]

(InfoWorld) - Tomorrow is May Day -- a festival that is freighted with meaning, whether you're celebrating spring and earthly renewal, observing pagan rituals, or even reveling in politics. Personally, I like to think of May as a time of fresh starts, as in, "I may finally begin that project this month."

In keeping with the theme of fresh starts, InfoWorld is ringing in the month of May with a celebration of technology startups. Our "Month of Enterprise Startups" (MOES) will shine a light on the business-focused startup companies with the brightest futures. Each day in May -- including Saturdays and Sundays -- we'll feature a new company (established no earlier than 2004) that's making waves in the enterprise space. I'm hoping we can entice you to come back daily for a slide show, company profiles and executive interviews, and other goodies. We'll be cheating just a bit, though, and kicking off the process one day early -- April 30 -- with a teaser that all startups can relate to, "How to get bought by Google" from Senior Editor Paul Roberts, the mastermind behind MOES.

Roberts was wearying of all the hype and investment activity around sexy, consumer-based tech startups, while the abundance of truly useful, innovative enterprise ventures go begging for attention. "I like watching The Daily Show clips on YouTube as much as the next guy," he says. "But the real question is 'How will developments like video streaming, Web-based applications, and social networking change the way people work and collaborate to get things done?' That's the question we set out to answer."

Security specialist Steve Hultquist set out to answer a different question: Can anything be done about rootkits, which can sneak into the enterprise undetected and leach sensitive personal and corporate data? Rootkits entered the public consciousness after the Sony BMG fiasco in late 2005. Now, we're locked into an arms race between cracker criminals seeking to exploit the technology and security vendors scrambling to shut it down. So far, the black hats have the upper hand. Until the good guys turn the tables, you'll want to consult "Rootkits: The next big enterprise threat?" for guidance.

Ephraim Schwartz, author of the Reality Check blog, could use a bit of guidance himself. His post "Beware Mob Media" -- where he warned that citizen journalism can lead to mob rule and is "a form of fascism waiting to happen" -- unleashed torrents of furious reader feedback. "Based on the responses, it appears that a sizeable percentage of the population just hates journalists," Schwartz concludes. "They think journalists aren't doing their job, they slant the news by selecting what they write about, and they're not fair. Many readers believe the only way to get the real story is through citizen journalism."

What do you think? Weigh in on Ephraim's blog and engage in a bit of participatory citizen journalism of your own.

Two more things ...

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In the past, I’ve often said that Google Docs and Spreadsheets is not a Microsoft Office competitor, based on the fact that MS Office is expensive, meant for business use and had much more functionality for power users. After checking the price and versions of MS Office whilst shopping yesterday, I take that back.

I’ve now seen that you can buy a copy of “Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007" for around £100. It includes Word (Docs), Excel (Spreadsheets), Powerpoint (Presently) and OneNote (Notebook), and is licensed for use on up to three computers providing they’re not used for commercial purposes.

Since Google is going after the home / student market, how many would choose Google over Microsoft? Personally, I’d rather use these Microsoft products because they’ve got more features. I’ve never got on with Docs (it’s basically just a glorified WYSIWYG HTML editor), Spreadsheets lacks many of the features of Excel (they’ve only just added charts and many of the shortcuts and quick ways of doing things still don’t work) and “Presently” doesn’t even exist... yet! As for OneNote or Notebook, I don’t need either. Furthermore, I’m relying on my Internet connection to work with Google products and I’d rather work offline.

Everyone seems to want free software but sometimes you get what you pay for in my opinion. Are these components of MS Office worth £30-35 per computer? I’d say so. Would I use Google services instead? Not right now. Having said that, I might consider using OpenOffice instead of MS Office but I just don’t feel Google Docs (etc.) is quite up to scratch yet.

To me, the only benefit of Google Docs is that everything is stored in a central storage point online. If Google gave me GDrive (without the 500KB limit like Docs has currently), I’d have no need to use their “Office” services as I could have MS Office / OpenOffice installed on all the computers I use and upload / download files as I need them.

What are other people’s opinions on this? Does Google offer you exactly what you need? Would you rather pay for better products (from either Microsoft or Google)? Would you rather work with files online or offline?

Also see a previous discussion about how much to pay for using Google.

[By Tony Ruscoe | Original post | Comments]

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