Google Street View in France

As a special present for the upcoming Tour de France, Google added Street View imagery for Tour de France's routes. The coverage is really limited, but Google will extend it in the next months, when Street View will be available in many European countries (UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and others).


Wikipedia has some details about this year's edition of the largest cycling race in the world. "The event will take place from July 5 to July 27, 2008. Starting in the French city of Brest, France, the tour will enter Italy on the 15th stage and return to France during the 16th, heading for Paris, its regular final destination, which will be reached in the 21st stage."


{ via Zorgloob, a French blog about Google }

Mobile Google Maps with Voice Search

An obvious use of the GOOG-411 service is to add speech recognition to Google's mobile mapping application. Microsoft already has voice support in Live Search for Windows Mobile and that's an important differentiating factor when you are on the go and you need a quick answer.

Google started to test Google Maps with voice search for three Blackberry Pearl models: 8110, 8120, 8130 and only for the US. Instead of typing when you want to search for a local business, hold the left-side key, say what you want to find and then release the key. Google Maps Mobile will display the search results on the map.

"Similar to other voice-recognition technologies, the accuracy of voice recognition will improve over time as more people use the voice search feature," says Google Mobile Blog. In fact, the main reason why GOOG-411 has been developed was to obtain data to train Google's speech recognition algorithms. "Whether or not free-411 is a profitable business unto itself is yet to be seen. I myself am somewhat skeptical. The reason we really did it is because we need to build a great speech-to-text model ... that we can use for all kinds of different things, including video search," explained Marissa Mayer from Google.

Speech recognition could greatly facilitate the way we interact with mobile phones and it's not hard to imagine that voice search will be the main way we'll use search engines in the future. This will change the way people formulate queries and processing natural language will become increasingly important. Microsoft's acquisition of Powerset, a so-called semantic search engine, could improve the way Live Search handles complicated queries, even though it's difficult to scale the computationally-intensive process of parsing text to the web and to all languages.

Taking Features Away From Users

Ryan Singer wrote an interesting post titled "Features are a one-way street". The main idea was that "once your user base has grown beyond a certain point, you cannot take features away from them. They will freak out. Whether the feature is good or bad, once you launch it you've married it."

Google is a company that launches many features and services "in beta", tests them for a while and then decides whether it's a good idea to continue developing them. Some of the Google Labs projects were successful, while others were discontinued or they were integrated in other experiments.

In a talk about innovation, Marissa Mayer mentioned an idea that came from Eric Schmidt: "don't kill projects, morph them". I don't know how many people miss Google Voice Search, a service that allowed you to search Google with a phone call, or Click-to-Call, a simple way to call businesses for free directly from Google Maps, but both services are the predecessors of GOOG-411. The cool Google Deskbar was partly integrated in Google Desktop, the SOAP Search API was replaced by a REST API, Google AdSense Referrals was superseded by the DoubleClick Performics Affiliate Network, while a replacement for Google Answers is being tested in Russia and China.

Other products were discontinued without offering a replacement: Google Video Store, the photo sharing service Hello, Google Browser Sync or the "Send to SMS" feature from Google Toolbar and from Google Send to Phone.


For Google, features aren't a "one-way street" and you never know when a functionality you start to rely on is removed for unknown reasons. That's why I think Google should label experimental features more prominently and it should do a better job at communicating the reasons why a service is dropped.

Google Docs Stats

If you publish documents at Google Docs and link them from web pages, you may wonder how many people actually view them. Google helps you find this information by placing a Google Analytics tracking code that can be connected to your account.

How to get traffic stats for your documents?

Just go to Google Analytics, create a new profile for http://docs.google.com and get the tracking code for that profile. You only need a small piece of the tracking code: the value displayed in bold below, which should be different for your account.

var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-84813-6")

Once you have that value, go to Google Docs Settings, enable "Track visits to my documents using Google Analytics" and paste the value in the input box for "Google Analytics tracking code".


What happens after enabling the integration with Google Analytics?

After a couple of hours, you should see some traffic data in your Analytics account:


You'll also find a confirmation that the visitor traffic is tracked with Google Analytics after you publish a document:


The list of Google services that integrate with Google Analytics includes: Google Sites, Project Hosting, iGoogle gadgets and hopefully the support will be extended to other services.

{ via Blogoscoped Forum }

The Best Firefox Extension for Google Bookmarks

If you use Google Toolbar for Firefox only because you like the bookmarking feature, there's a much better option: GMarks. While there are other extensions that provide an interface for Google Bookmarks, John Marshall's GMarks adds a lot of value to Google's basic bookmarking service.

GMarks can display the bookmarks almost the same as Firefox's native bookmarks: in a separate menu and in the sidebar. There's also a dropdown that can be added to Firefox's toolbars. The sidebar is useful when you want to perform full-text searches in your bookmarks without having to visit Google's site, while the GMark menu has an excellent option for managing bookmarks. If you click on "Organize bookmarks", you'll be able to import bookmarks, edit or delete bookmarks and create Gmail-like filters. For example, you can automatically add the label Google for any bookmark from this blog.


The extension can show the number of bookmarks for each label, a list of recent bookmarks and the most frequently visited bookmarks. To bookmark a page, use the familiar shortcut Ctrl+D or the GMarks menu.

One of the most frequent user requests for Google Bookmarks is nested labels and GMarks uses a little trick to simulate hierarchical labels: separate the labels with >. For example, if you want to label a bookmark as Shopping and Comparison, where Comparison is a sublabel of Shopping, just enter Shopping>Comparison when you create the bookmark. Since Google Bookmarks doesn't support this feature, the labels will appear to be nested only in GMarks.

And the cool features don't stop here: the extension suggests labels based on the web page's title, you can hide the bookmarks that have certain labels and there's an option for integrating the starred items from Google Reader.

Since the last time when I wrote about GMarks, the extension added the most interesting ideas implemented by the "competition" and managed to become THE Google Bookmarks extension. If there's anything that could be added, maybe it would be useful to completely replace Firefox's bookmarking system by hiding all the interface elements related to the native bookmarks and replicating all the changes to Google Bookmarks locally.

{ Thanks, Dr. Azrael Tod. }

Mozilla's Weave Prototype Updated

After Google announced that Browser Sync will no longer be updated and will stop working at the end of the year, many people looked for an alternative. The closest project to Browser Sync is Mozilla Weave, a Firefox extension that synchronizes local data from your browser with a server so you can access your data from multiple computers. Unfortunately, Weave is still an experimental prototype, so it can be buggy and unreliable.

Weave 0.2 has been released today and it supports new data types: cookies, passwords, saved form data and sessions, in addition to bookmarks and browsing history. After installing the extension and restarting Firefox, you need to create an account and enter a key used for encryption.


Unlike Browser Sync, Weave doesn't synchronizes data in real-time. "After the initial data transfer is completed during setup, Weave connects to the server periodically when it accumulates enough changes that need syncing or when enough time has passed since the last sync (at least once every 20 minutes if any data has changed). Weave also syncs when you start Firefox, when you quit it, and when you click on the "Sync Now" button in the Weave menu or the preferences."

It's worth mentioning that browser data sync is just one of the components that will be included in Weave. "As the Web continues to evolve and more of our lives move online, we believe that Web browsers like Firefox can and should do more to broker rich experiences while increasing user control over their data and personal information. Weave is the Mozilla Labs' project to develop a coherent framework and platform for deeply integrating online services with the browser."

Opera users can already synchronize bookmarks and notes using a feature included in the latest version of the browser. If you only need to synchronize your bookmarks, migrate to an online bookmarking service like del.icio.us, Google Bookmarks, or install plug-ins like Foxmarks (Firefox), Zinmko (Firefox / IE), that synchronize bookmarks and provide a web interface where you can access and share your bookmarks.

Adobe Helps Search Engines Find Flash Files

Adobe announced that it provided some its Flash technology to Google and Yahoo in order to improve the indexing of SWF files and especially Flex applications. "Although search engines already index static text and links within SWF files, RIAs and dynamic web content have been generally difficult to fully expose to search engines because of their changing states."

To solve this problem, Adobe decided to share Flash Player technology that allows search engines to walk through a SWF file and simulate user interactions. "We've developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed," explains Google's Webmaster Blog. The indexing algorithm, which is already live, has some important limitations: it ignores Flash files loaded using JavaScript and it separately handles external resources loaded by Flash files.

I couldn't find too many Flash sites that are fully indexed by Google, probably because we need to wait until Google updates its index.