Bally Chohan - News, Views & Reviews on Information System

When you log in to Google Docs & Spreadsheets today, you might be in for a bit of a surprise: we’ve completed a pretty significant redesign. Since we launched Google Docs & Spreadsheets less than a year ago, we’ve made dozens of updates to enable better collaboration. As more and more documents accumulated, users asked for an even easier way to manage them. With this latest refresh, you’ll see that we have been listening to feedback and spending time thinking about the best ways to stay organized.

Some highlights of the clean new look:

• Sidebar with folders: For those who used tags, all your tags have been converted into folders, and you can now drag and drop your documents into any folder. Just like tags, docs can live in multiple folders.
• Documents sorted by collaborator: Sometimes you can’t think of the title or even the content of a document, but you remember whom you shared it with or who shared it with you. To make sorting easier, we’ve added new “created by me” and “shared with…” folders.
• Better search: With autocomplete, all relevant documents, folders, and collaborators are displayed as soon as you begin typing your search query.

The redesign also includes new icons, chronological sorting, and an easier way to save documents in alternate formats.

These features and other improvements are now available to anybody using Google Docs & Spreadsheets at http://docs.google.com or through Google Apps.

Google is keeping a close eye on a small, suburban Melbourne start-up that claims to be developing a search engine that improves on the world leader.

MyLiveSearch, which plans to go live as a public beta in a few weeks, is the brainchild of self-taught software developer Rob Gabriel.

Mr Gabriel, 35, says his search engine gives better, more relevant results than the search king because it is a truly “live” search.

Google’s search engine works by building a vast index of web pages, via automated “spiders” that crawl through billions of web pages a year. However this represents only a fraction of the enormous, sprawling internet, and the index can never be entirely up to date.

Yahoo! search and (despite its name) Microsoft’s Live search work the same way.

MyLiveSearch is fundamentally different. It works through a small browser plug-in. The search terms are put through Google, or other indexed search databases, but those results are treated as “starting points” alongside the user’s bookmarks and other popular web hubs.

From there, the live search takes over, crawling through hundreds of web pages connected to those starting points in search of more information relevant to the search.

Mr Gabriel says the results come back in seconds, and are almost always richer, more detailed and more useful than a standard, index-based search. His product can also search the so-called “invisible web” of dynamically-generated web pages that search engines have trouble indexing.

“This has the potential to change the way people search the internet,” he said. “Google can’t search every page every day (to build its index). The web is so dynamic and changes so often - MyLiveSearch turns your own computer into a ’super-spider’ to search it in real time.

“This technology could be snapped onto any of the major search engines and improve them.”

A Google business development representative has met with the MyLiveSearch team at least twice - once when the technology was at a very early stage, and again last week after Next made inquiries about Google’s interest in the project.

Google did not want to comment on MyLiveSearch, except in general terms.

“We’re really keen to support Australian developers and IT entrepreneurs,” spokesman Rob Shilkin said. “Google Maps was a small Aussie start-up. And Google itself started as two guys in a garage.”

The company has a history of acquiring technology that might help a competitor. In April last year Google bought the rights to an advanced text-search algorithm invented by University of NSW student Ori Allon. Mr Allon, 26, was given a job at Google’s headquarters at Mountain View California.

Search for any human name on google image search and append &imgtype=face in the url 

Google upped its stalker factor this week by adding face recognition abilities to its image search. While currently unofficial and unannounced, users can now search for images that only contain faces by appending a query string onto the end of a search URL. For example, a general image search for “Ars Technica” produces a variety of image results, but when appending “&imgtype=face” to the end of the URL, all new results contain photos of people.

The hidden feature was discovered by Google Blogoscoped, and there is currently no way to indicate that you only want to search for faces through the image search interface. However, both “&imgtype=face” and “&imgtype=news” trigger different search results than what is presented by default—the latter showing only images that are associated with news stories.

The technology appears to be the fruit of Google’s 2006 acquisition of Neven Vision, a company that had developed techniques for facial recognition in photos. “Neven Vision comes to Google with deep technology and expertise around automatically extracting information from a photo. It could be as simple as detecting whether or not a photo contains a person, or, one day, as complex as recognizing people, places, and objects,” wrote Picasa product manager Adrian Graham on the Official Google Blog last August.

Google is apparently taking that technology to heart by experimenting with facial recognition online. Even cooler (or creepier, as the case may be), one day Google’s image search may be able to find faces of specific people based on image analysis/recognition alone instead of relying on the text associated with that image to identify the person in the photo. We can probably expect more search parameters to be added to the search in the future, too, such as different types of animals, different clothing items, and more. Until then, we’re stuck experimenting with different search terms in hopes of discovering one that the public doesn’t know about yet.

By - Jacqui Cheng

Google is expanding seemingly by the minute, and acquisitions are playing a big role in the search engine leader’s quest to rule the technology world. Wednesday Google said it will buy a photo-sharing Web site called Panoramio and confirmed the acquisition of security software vendor GreenBorder Technologies. There are rumors Google will also purchase a provider of online RSS feeds called Feedburner for US$100 million.

In all, Google has agreed to make at least 11 purchases of companies or technologies in the past year. Google usually doesn’t release financial terms of small deals, but the big ones are substantial: US$1.65 billion for YouTube and US$3.1 billion for DoubleClick (the latter deal is pending a federal investigation). A little bit more than a year ago, Google spent US$1 billion for a 5 percent stake in AOL.

The past year’s purchases, which we describe below, have helped Google shore up gaps in its product line, develop a better office application suite capable of competing with Microsoft Office, and build on its massive success in online advertising. Microsoft has made 13 acquisitions in the same time frame, including a US$6 billion deal during May for aQuantive, a digital marketing and advertising company).

Pending acquisition

April 2007: Google agrees to buy Internet advertising company DoubleClick for US$3.1 billion. Microsoft, which failed in an attempt to buy DoubleClick, urged federal regulators to block the purchase, saying it would hurt competition in Web advertising. The Federal Trade Commission has just launched an antitrust investigation into the Google-DoubleClick deal.

 Completed acquisitions

  May 30, 2007: Google agrees to buy Panoramio, a community photos Web site based in Spain that connects pictures to the exact geographical location where they were taken, allowing users to view those photographs in Google Earth. Google and Panoramio had already been working together for several months before the purchase, and the deal is expected to lead to further integration of Panoramio content with Google mapping technology.

May 29, 2007: Google buys GreenBorder Technologies, a maker of browser-based security software. The acquisition should help Google strengthen protection against malware across its line of Web applications. “The idea is that these guys have great expertise in the security domain that can provide obvious benefits to Google, its users and its advertisers,” a Google spokesman told InfoWorld.

April 2007: Google buys Tonic Systems, which makes technology for creating presentations and document conversion. The purchase is part of Google’s strategy to add presentation sharing and collaboration capabilities to Google Docs & Spreadsheets, a competitor of Microsoft Office.

April 2007: Google buys videoconferencing software from Stockholm vendor Marratech. Google plans to use the software for its employees, and has not yet announced any plans to market the videoconferencing technology.

March 2007: Google buys Adscape Media, which makes technology for placing advertisements in video games. The US$23 million deal came less than a year after Microsoft bought video game advertising company Massive for US$200 million, a move that was seen as an attempt by Microsoft to get a leg up on Google in the advertising realm.

March 2007: Google buys Trendalyzer software from a nonprofit called Gapminder. Trendalyzer makes statistics more understandable by converting numbers into interactive animations.

December 2006: For $28 million, Google buys part of Endoxon, an Internet mapping technology company in Switzerland, in a move to bolster European maps in the Google Earth downloadable application and the online Google Maps.

October 2006:Google buys YouTube for US$1.65 billion in a stock transaction. Google subsequently bolstered its video search engine with YouTube content in a move to integrate the two sites. The downside: Google got hit with a US$1 billion lawsuit from Viacom alleging that YouTube enables copyright infringement.

October 2006: Google buys JotSpot, which makes wiki technology for collaborative Web sites. Google’s long-term strategy for JotSpot is unclear. New signups for JotSpot stopped after the purchase, and customers are still waiting to hear what Google’s plans are for the service, which has suffered from some performance and availability problems since being acquired.

August 2006:Google buys Neven Vision, a company that specializes in mobile photo search. The deal was made to improve Picasa, a free download that helps users share and edit photos, and locate and organize photos on their computers. Neven Vision technology obtains information from photos, such as whether they contain images of people.

Source -http://www.linuxworld.com.au/index.php/id;1941637819;fp;4;fpid;3