Google Toolbar 7 for Internet Explorer
Google launched a new version of its toolbar for Internet Explorer, but it’s only for IE8 and IE9. Google Toolbar 7 focuses on search: there’s support for Google Instant, the search box is a lot bigger and all the other features are available in the “More” drop-down.
There’s a funny help center article titled “Where did my buttons go?” which answers the most obvious question after installing Google Toolbar 7.
“You may have noticed that some or all of your Toolbar buttons have disappeared with the latest update of Toolbar. The newest version of Toolbar helps you focus on the features you use the most, by removing your less frequently used buttons from view. If you’ve recently used a specific Tool on your Toolbar, its button will be pinned to the Toolbar so that you have easy access to it. Otherwise, all buttons are removed by default. Don’t fret — you can easily add your favorite features back to the Toolbar. Click More next to the search box and select the tool that you want to add. It’ll automatically appear back on the Toolbar.”
So Google Toolbar features are less discoverable, users lost some of their preferences, but the toolbar is less cluttered.
Google Instant integration is not enabled by default, but you can open the options dialog and check “Enable Instant for faster searching and browsing”.
For some reason, Google also installs Google Toolbar 7.1 for Firefox, which is an old version of toolbar and doesn’t include the new features. The extension can be uninstalled from Control Panel, not from Firefox.
Google The Future, According to Google’s Results
Today’s XKCD comic explores the future using the top Google results for queries like “by the year *”, “by <year> *”. According to Google’s search results, one year after the 2012 Apocalypse, “microchipping of all Americans begins”. In 2014 “GNU/Linux becomes the dominant OS” and by the year 2020, HTML5 is finished and “newspapers become obsolete and die out”.
Here’s the entire future timeline, which includes prediction about Android, US debt, India, world population, global warming and robot policemen.
{ comic licensed as Creative Commons }
Magento Webinar: Optimizing SEO for Improved ROI
A Webinar Presented by Zeon Solutions and Magento
Optimizing SEO for Improved ROI
Traffic acquisition and search engine optimization (SEO) strategies are a major consideration when evaluating an eCommerce website. The truth of SEO is that it’s best addressed before implementation. However, even sites that are already deployed can attract more customers and recognize revenue benefits by implementing a well-structured SEO plan.
Join your peers as the SEO experts from Zeon Solutions detail the importance of building your website with search engine optimization in mind. The webinar will walk you through best practices for new site development, existing site redesign and post-launch SEO activities.
Presented by Zeon Solutions and Magento
Date: Wednesday, April 27 @ 11am PDT
Registration: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/546881272
Google Translate, Now With Voice Input
Google Chrome 11 added support for HTML speech input API. “With this API, developers can give web apps the ability to transcribe your voice to text. When a web page uses this feature, you simply click on an icon and then speak into your computer’s microphone. The recorded audio is sent to speech servers for transcription, after which the text is typed out for you.”
Google Translate is the first Google service that uses this feature. If you use Google Chrome 11 Beta, Google Chrome 12 Dev/Canary or a recent Chromium build and visit Google Translate, you can click the voice input icon. Right now, this feature only works for English, so you need to select “English” from the list of input languages.
Unfortunately, the results aren’t great. I tried to translate “beautiful sunshine” into French, but the speech-to-text engine didn’t work properly and Google had to translate “wake up beautiful sunshine girl”.
{ Thanks, Kalin. }
A Google a Day
Google launched a site that shows a puzzle which can be solved using Google Search. “A Google a Day is a new daily puzzle that can be solved using your creativity and clever search skills on Google. Questions will be posted every day on agoogleaday.com and printed on weekdays above the New York Times crossword puzzle,” informs Google’s blog. Some may say it’s just a way to increase Google’s market share in the US, now that Bing is increasingly popular. Microsoft also used games to attract more users, so it’s not a new idea. Unlike Microsoft’s Club Bing, there’s no monetary incentive to solve Google’s puzzles.
“A Google a Day” was created by Daniel Russell, a Googler who has a great blog about web search. “For the past several years I’ve been trying to put together some kind of game that would engage people in a playful way to learn how to search. After many trials, we FINALLY got one version of the Search Game out into the world! AGoogleADay.com is a simple game that poses a daily search puzzle for you to solve. The game starts today (Monday April 11, 2011) and will run for the next four weeks with each day’s puzzle getting harder from Monday through Friday. The secret agenda here is to get people to play around with search and to learn all they can do. I’ve felt for a while like Goggle gives people intergalactic hyperdrive starship capabilities, but most people only explore the shallows by paddling around with their shuttlecraft,” notes Daniel.
The most interesting thing about Google’s new site is that it uses an index called Deja Google which leaves out recent web pages. “To keep the game interesting for everyone, we created Deja Google – a wormhole inspired time machine that searches the Internet as it existed before the game began. Because nobody wants someone’s recent blog post about finding an answer spoiling their fun.”
Until Deja Google becomes a standalone service, you can use agoogleaday.com to remove recent pages from the results and to search Google’s index from April 5. You can also bookmark this URL: http://www.google.com/webhp?esrch=Agad::Public&nord=1.
Opera Turbo Uses WebP to Compress Images
Opera is probably the best browser for slow Internet connections, especially if you enable Opera Turbo, a proxy that compresses web pages. Opera 11.10 improved this feature significantly by replacing highly compressed JPEGs with WebP images.
“The most noticeable difference is probably WebP. An open standard image format that was released with some fanfare by Google last year. We thought it was about time to replace the 20 year old JPEG format with something more modern. Overall, WebP produces images with less artifacts and crisper details, even though the image takes less space,” says Opera’s Audun Mathias Øygard.
Here’s an image from BBC’s site in Opera 11.01 (JPEG) and Opera 11.10 (WebP):
Opera’s tests showed that there’s an important speed improvement: “about 22% less data transferred compared between old and new Opera Turbo”. For example, BBC’s science page uses 724.1 KB, instead of 1111 KB, in the old version of Opera Turbo.
There are two browsers that support WebP: Chrome and Opera 11.10, but Opera’s team found a great way to use it. It’s important to mention that WebP is based on WebM/VP8, a video format open sourced by Google.
{ via FavBrowser }
Google Docs Adds Pagination and Native Printing
After two months of testing, Google Docs added a very useful feature: pagination. Google Docs adds “visual page breaks while you’re editing your documents, so now you can see how many pages of that report you’ve actually finished. Headers now show up at the top of each page instead of just at the top of your doc, manual page breaks actually move text onto a new page and footnotes appear at the bottom of the pages themselves.”
If you use Google Chrome, you’ll see an important change when printing a document: it’s no longer converted to PDF. “We’ve worked closely with the Chrome team to implement a recent web standard so we can support a feature called native printing. (…) With native printing, you can print directly from your browser and the printed document will always exactly match what you see on your screen,” explains Google. Until now, Google converted the document to PDF and you had to download the file and print it using Adobe Reader or a similar PDF viewer.
Google Docs looks more and more like an advanced word processor. You no longer have to use workarounds for basic features like pagination and printing.
Google 1 billion computing core-hours for researchers to tackle huge scientific challenges
Computing is an invaluable resource for advancement of scientific breakthroughs. Today we’re announcing an academic research grant program called Google Exacycle for Visiting Faculty, which provides 1 billion hours of computational core capacity to researchers. That’s orders of magnitude larger than the computational resources most scientists normally have access to.
This program is focused on large-scale, batch computations in research areas such as biomedicine, energy, weather and climate, earth sciences and astronomy. For example, scientists could use massive amounts of computation to simulate how pharmaceuticals interact with proteins in the human body to develop new medicines. Other uses could include simulations to predict weather patterns and analysis of telescope images to understand how the universe changes over time.
Exacycle for Visiting Faculty is part of our University Relations team’s larger efforts to stimulate advances in science and engineering research. If you’re a full-time faculty member, we encourage you to apply by May 31, 2011.
In the future, we think this service could also be useful for businesses in various industries, like biotech, financial services, manufacturing and energy. If your business can benefit from hundreds of millions of core-hours to solve complex technical challenges and you want to discuss potential applications, please contact us.
Posted by Alfred Spector, VP of Research and Special Initiatives
Google Tests a Search Option for Definitions
Google experiments with a search option that lets you find the definition of a word without using the define: operator or adding “definition” to the query. Selecting the “dictionary” option from the sidebar doesn’t restrict the results to sites like Dictionary.com and Answers.com, but shows the information that’s available in Google Dictionary. To be fair, Google includes a section called “web definitions” that shows definitions from Wikipedia, WordNet and from different glossaries.
This feature is not yet available to everyone, but you can always install extensions like Google Dictionary for Chrome, Google Dictionary and Google Translate for Firefox or add Google Dictionary to your browser’s search engines.
Reading Levels in Google’s Sidebar
Google’s search options sidebar includes a feature that was only available in the advanced search page: filtering results by reading level. If you enable this feature, Google will classify search results based on the complexity of the text. You can restrict the results to “basic” pages, “intermediate” pages and “advanced” pages, which are mostly scholarly articles.
“Sometimes you may want to limit your search results to a specific reading level. For instance, a junior high school teacher looking for content for her students or a second-language learner might want web pages written at a basic reading level. A scientist searching for the latest findings from the experts may want to limit results to those at advanced reading levels,” explains Google.
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