Friday, October 15, 2010

Googland

Googland

[G] New Featured Extensions

Posted: 15 Oct 2010 04:28 AM PDT

Google Chrome Blog: New Featured Extensions

With so many new extensions uploaded in the gallery every day, we know it can be tricky to decide which ones to try out. We post a selection of the ones we enjoy in the "Featured" section of the gallery, and from now on we plan to update you regularly on new additions to our recommended extensions.

Here are a few new extensions in the Featured section:


Layers allows you to overlay content like sticky notes, images, videos, tweets and even maps over any web site. You can drag and drop your content anywhere on the page. You can also share and discuss whatever you add to the site with your friends across social networks.


The Postrank extension for Google Reader helps you stay up-to-date on the news and posts that matter. The extension aggregates engagement activity such as tweets, comments and votes from over two dozen social networks and ranks stories based on how much engagement each story has received.



With the Ozone extension, you can get suggestions from fifteen different sources like Google, Amazon, your bookmarks, Gmail, YouTube and more. As you type in the Ozone search box, you can see the suggestions change in real time.



Highlight to Search is a new official Google extension that allows you to search keywords by highlighting instead of typing them into a search box. When you highlight words within a web page, you'll see a magnifying glass icon appear below the highlighted keywords. Clicking on the icon or the keywords allows you to search easily from the search box that immediately appears.

These are just a few of the new featured Chrome extensions, and you can find many more in the gallery.


Posted by Koh Kim, Associate Product Marketing Manager
URL: http://chrome.blogspot.com/2010/10/new-featured-extension.html

[G] Avoiding accidental clicks Pt. 1: Keeping the right distance

Posted: 15 Oct 2010 03:27 AM PDT

Inside AdSense: Avoiding accidental clicks Pt. 1: Keeping the right distance

In the past, we've talked about ad placements that are prone to generate invalid clicks. In a past post, for example, Mike noted that publishers should be careful about placing ads too close to navigational controls or other clickable page elements.

It's in the best interest of the user, advertiser, and publisher to avoid implementations that lead to invalid click activity. As you can imagine, users aren't very happy if they accidentally click an ad instead of a link on your page and are directed away from your site. Advertisers also don't want to be charged for a click that a user made accidentally (though of course we do not charge advertisers for invalid clicks that we detect). And why should publishers care? Well, if we see that most of the clicks coming from your pages are invalid, we may need to disable your account to protect our advertisers.

One type of site we wanted to talk about are Flash-based game sites. Playing games on these sites, you'll notice that ads are often placed very close to the Flash player where the game is played. Publishers may reason that they're providing maximum value to advertisers by placing their ads very close to the area where their users are focused. However, many of these Flash games are played with a mouse, and the action in the games can lead users to do a lot of rapid cursor movements and clicking. We've seen many cases where ads were placed too closely to where the action was taking place, generating many accidental clicks.

Since each game and site are unique, we can't advise publishers on an exact distance between ads and games, but we do recommend a minimum distance of 150 pixels between the Flash player and ads.

We've worked with publishers on these issues in the past and noticed that increasing the distance between Flash player and ads has had, on average, a positive long-term effect on CPCs. The reason for this is smart pricing. As you may know, the revenue you receive is based on the amount an AdWords advertiser pays for each click on their Google ad. The amount the advertiser pays varies per ad and from website to website, based on the likelihood that a click will result in a conversion for the advertiser. If we determine that clicks on a site are less likely to lead to business results for an advertiser (e.g., an online sale or registration), we reduce the price that an advertiser will pay for those clicks.

So, in short: Moving the ads further away from Flash games decreases the likelihood of accidental clicks and increases the number of clicks leading to business results for advertisers. A good deal for all involved.

Posted by Dan Zilic - AdSense Policy team
URL: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/10/avoiding-accidental-clicks-pt-1-keeping.html

[G] Grow traffic with help from YouTube videos and AdWords

Posted: 14 Oct 2010 11:47 PM PDT

Inside AdWords: Grow traffic with help from YouTube videos and AdWords

Editors note: Today's guest bloggers are Troy Olson, Digital Advertising Manager, and Jeff Loquist, Search Marketing Manager, for ShoppersChoice.com. ShoppersChoice.com owns and operates a family of web stores with a wide selection of products, from barbecue grills and accessories to patio sets.

We started out with search-based advertising using Google AdWords. It helped us get traffic to our site BBQGuys.com at a relatively low cost – AdWords has been a great way to help us capture customers when they're looking for a "BBQ grill" and other items we offer.

We happened upon marketing on YouTube almost by accident. In response to customer service calls, we started creating instructional videos to show people how to best use their BBQ grills. We were getting a lot of traffic and great comments. So we decided to build out our Brand Channel and add more content, such as recipes by Chef Tony. YouTube is great for conveying our company image, and distributing unique content that people can relate to, especially people who enjoy food and eating! Learn more about our "secret sauce" for success that combines YouTube and AdWords.

Posted by Gordon Zhu, Inside AdWords crew
URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2010/10/grow-traffic-with-help-from-youtube.html

[G] Korean Voice Input -- Have you Dictated your E-Mails in Korean lately?

Posted: 14 Oct 2010 11:03 PM PDT

Official Google Research Blog: Korean Voice Input -- Have you Dictated your E-Mails in Korean lately?

Posted by Mike Schuster & Kaisuke Nakajima, Google Research

Google Voice Search has been available in various flavors of English since 2008, in Mandarin and Japanese since 2009, in French, Italian, German and Spanish since June 2010 (see also in this blog post), and shortly after that in Taiwanese. On June 16th 2010, we took the next step by launching our Korean Voice Search system.

Korean Voice Search, by focusing on finding the correct web page for a spoken query, has been quite successful since launch. We have improved the acoustic models several times which resulted in significantly higher accuracy and reduced latency, and we are committed to improving it even more over time.

While voice search significantly simplifies input for search, especially for longer queries, there are numerous applications on any smartphone that could also benefit from general voice input, such as dictating an email or an SMS. Our experience with US English has taught us that voice input is as important as voice search, as the time savings from speaking rather than typing a message are substantial. Korean is the first non-English language where we are launching general voice input. This launch extends voice input to emails, SMS messages, and more on Korean Android phones. Now every text field on the phone will accept Korean speech input.

Creating a general voice input service had different requirements and technical challenges compared to voice search. While voice search was optimized to give the user the correct web page, voice input was optimized to minimize (Hangul) character error rate. Voice inputs are usually longer than searches (short full sentences or parts of sentences), and the system had to be trained differently for this type of data. The current system's language model was trained on millions of Korean sentences that are similar to those we expect to be spoken. In addition to the queries we used for training voice search, we also used parts of web pages, selected blogs, news articles and more. Because the system expects spoken data similar to what it was trained on, it will generally work well on normal spoken sentences, but may yet have difficulty on random or rare word sequences -- we will work to keep improving on those.

Korean voice input is part of Google's long-term goal to make speech input an acceptable and useful form of input on any mobile device. As with voice search, our cloud computing infrastructure will help us to improve quality quickly, as we work to better support all noise conditions, all Korean dialects, and all Korean users.
URL: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2010/10/korean-voice-input-have-you-dictated.html

[G] Strike up the band: over 10 million have gone Google with Apps for Education

Posted: 14 Oct 2010 08:37 PM PDT

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Strike up the band: over 10 million have gone Google with Apps for Education

(Cross posted on the Official Google Blog)

It was four years ago this month that Google Apps for Education first touched down, right before a pivotal football game between ASU and USC—fatefully enough, two schools that were among the first to move to Google Apps and pave the way for other schools to adopt this "alien technology."

This week at EDUCAUSE we're celebrating with these schools and the thousands of others that make up more than 10 million students, staff, faculty and alumni that are actively using Apps for Education on campus. We figured that nothing was more fitting than a tailgate celebration to toast the colleges and universities that have "gone Google." And of course, it's not really a party without inviting the marching band.



In the last four years we've seen a lot of changes, both to our tools and the general landscape of cloud computing in higher education. According to the 2010 Campus Computing project, nearly 85% of four-year colleges and universities are already using or considering moving to the cloud by offering hosted email to their students. Of those schools that have already made the move, more than 56% of them have gone Google.

As part of this sustained momentum, we've seen the number of active Google Apps for Education users double since last fall, with more than two million new users coming on board since May alone; not to mention the emerging growth we're now seeing in the K-12 space.

Hundreds of schools have made the move to Google Apps just this year, including Gonzaga University, Barnard, Brown University, William and Mary, Villanova University, Georgetown School of Business, Case Western Reserve University, Hawai'i Pacific University, Brandeis University, more than half of the 23 campuses in the California State University system, Morehouse College, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Texas A&M Alumni, University of Tennessee Chattanooga, 13 of the SUNY schools, Pace University and Wilfrid Laurier—to name just a few.

The USC Trojan Marching Band helped us give a spirited cheer to the schools who have gone Google and the progress we've seen in the last four years. But like any good commencement address will tell you, this is only the beginning.


Posted by Miriam Schneider, Google Apps for Education Team
URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/10/strike-up-band-over-10-million-have.html

[G] Tips & Tricks: Sharing Google Docs Like a Pro

Posted: 14 Oct 2010 04:30 PM PDT

Official Google Docs Blog: Tips & Tricks: Sharing Google Docs Like a Pro

Google Docs enables you to collaborate on your documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and drawings with as many, or as few, people as you'd like. We've explained our new sharing model before, but, in recognition of National Cyber Security Awareness month, we want to make sure you're aware of your options for sharing your documents.

Google Docs Sharing Icons 101

In your document list, you'll notice various icons and descriptions listed next to the title of each doc. Here's a general overview:
  • A lock icon means "Private"
  • A lock icon in front of a globe means "Anyone with the link"
  • A globe means "Public on the web"
Next to each of these icons, you'll see text indicating who can edit a doc and who can view a doc -- a collaborator is able to edit, while a viewer can access a doc in view-only mode.

Let's look at a few examples:


If you have a doc with a lock icon that reads "Not shared," the doc is private to only you. No one but you can find, view or edit that document.

If your doc has a lock icon that reads "[Owner's name] to X collaborators, Y viewers," that document is accessible to you and the people with whom you (or a collaborator, if you have given collaborators the ability to change permissions) have explicitly shared it. If the link to the doc is sent to someone who hasn't been granted either view- or edit-access, that person won't be able to open the doc.

The sharing setting "Anyone with the link" is represented by a small lock over a globe. If you see this icon, it means that the doc is viewable to anyone who has the link to the doc. You can also explicitly allow certain individuals to edit the document, which is represented by the text "3 collaborators."

If this link is inadvertently shared with people who shouldn't have access, you can always reset the link by clicking Reset link in the sharing dialog in your doc:



If your doc is set to public, it will have a globe next to it, and it could potentially be found and viewed by anyone on the web. We call this setting "Public on the web (anyone can view)." If you check the box to allow anyone to edit in the sharing dialog, your doc will also be editable by anyone who opens it.

Be cautious when using this setting to help avoid sharing information beyond your comfort level.

View access versus edit access to a doc
In addition to the indicators above, you can see who can view a doc and who can edit a doc from the sharing dialog within the doc itself. If the doc is set to "Private to X collaborators, Y viewers," you'll be able to see which collaborators can view and which collaborators can edit. In the drop-down menu, the owner of the doc, or collaborators who have been granted permission, can change this setting for each person.

Click Change next to the text "Editors will be allowed to add people and change the permissions" if you don't want to allow people with edit access on your doc to be able to share the document or change the sharing settings.

For docs with the sharing settings 'Anyone with the link' or 'Public on the web,' the Visibility options pane lets you control whether people viewing the doc will also be able to edit it. Check the box next to "Allow anyone to edit (no sign-in required)" if you'd like anyone who opens your doc to be able to edit it.

Note that both collaborators with view access to a doc and collaborators that have edit access will be able to make a copy of the data or material contained in the doc.

Using this handy reference for sharing icons and settings, we encourage you to go through your document list at docs.google.com and check your document sharing settings to make sure that you're sharing and collaborating securely in Google Docs. You can learn more about sharing and visibility settings in the Google Docs Help Center.

Posted by: Julia Harter, Consumer Operations Associate
URL: http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/10/tips-tricks-sharing-google-docs-like.html

[G] DFP Production API Now Available

Posted: 14 Oct 2010 03:31 PM PDT

DoubleClick Publisher Blog: DFP Production API Now Available

A few months ago we introduced the new DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) API to enable publishers and third-parties to customize and extend how they use DFP.

The API comes in two flavors: sandbox and production environments. When we initially released the API, all developers could use the the sandbox environment to to test their code without affecting their live ads.

Today, we're excited to announce that we are now accepting applications for production API access. The production environment represents the data you see in your DFP account, and allows access and changes to your live data.

To request access to the production API environment, please complete this form.

After filling out the form, you will be contacted regarding your eligibility to participate. The application is currently open to all publishers using DoubleClick for Publishers or DFP Small Business.

Posted by Adam Rogal, Developer Programs Engineer
URL: http://doubleclickpublishers.blogspot.com/2010/10/dfp-production-api-now-available.html

[G] Phishing URLs and XML Notifications

Posted: 14 Oct 2010 01:45 PM PDT

Google Online Security Blog: Phishing URLs and XML Notifications

Posted by Nav Jagpal, Security team

Recently, we announced Safe Browsing Alerts for Network Administrators. Today we're adding phishing URLs to the notification messages. This means that in addition to being alerted to compromised URLs found on networks, you'll be alerted to phishing URLs as well.

We'd also like to point out the XML notification feature. By default, we send notification messages in a simple email message. However, we realize that some of you may want to process these notifications by a script, so we've added the ability to receive messages in XML format. Click on an AS in your list to modify preferences, such as enabling the XML notification feature. If you decide to use XML email messages, you should familiarize yourself with the XML Schema.

If you're a network administrator and haven't yet registered your AS, you can do so here.
URL: http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2010/10/phishing-urls-and-xml-notifications.html

[G] Tips for creating a free business listing in Google Places: Business listing titles

Posted: 14 Oct 2010 01:39 PM PDT

Google LatLong: Tips for creating a free business listing in Google Places: Business listing titles


Users search on Google.com and Google Maps because they're looking for relevant, high-quality content that answers a question or fulfills a need. This useful information often appears in the form of business listings on the search results page, and these free listings are an important way for local business owners to connect with potential customers. We want to help you make the most of your business listing, so this is the first post in three-part blog series about how to set up a clear and effective business listing via Google Places. This first installment delves into the specific topic of business listing titles — also known as your company or organization name — and highlights some of the common issues business owners encounter when creating a listing.

Example of business listings displayed on google.com

Accurately list your basic business information

If you already have a business listing and want to tweak it, or if you haven't yet claimed your business listing, sign in or visit Google Places here. The "Company/Organization" field will also serve as your business listing title, so you'll want to enter in the exact name of your business. For example, for a business called "Fly Fishing Frankie's Ltd." the following would be its correct business and contact details:

Company/Organization: Fly Fishing Frankie's Ltd.
Street Address: 88 Fish Road
City/Town and Postal Code: Fishtown, CA 90210
Main Phone: (555) 555-5555
Website: www.example_for_flyfishingfrankies.com

A clean, easy-to-read title

The title of your business listing should reflect the exact name of your company or organization as it's used in the real world. While it's acceptable to leave off company extensions like Ltd, GmbH or Inc, since those identifiers aren't helpful to users, be sure to avoid adding any descriptions that aren't part of the official business name or making any modifications to the official name. Your business listing title must match the business name you use in the real world (e.g. on signage, letterheads or business cards) in order to comply with our Google Places quality guidelines. Listings that are in violation of these guidelines may be suspended and won't appear in Google search results.

Here are some additional reminders about business titles based on some of the offending listings we see and have to suspend. We also let you know how and where to include specific information you want to provide potential customers, while complying with our quality guidelines.
  • Descriptors and keywords — The following are common examples of modified business titles. These are instances in which either descriptive phrases are used in lieu of the correct business name, or additional keywords and phrases have been added to the business name. These examples are not in accordance with our quality guidelines:
    • [Example title violation] Professional fishing travels
    • [Example title violation] Fly Fishing Frankie's Ltd. - fishing, cutter travels, eating crabs
    • [Example title violation] Fly Fishing Frankie's Ltd. entertaining cutter travels
    Note: While the "Company/Organization" field may only contain the name of your business, if you'd like to provide more information about your business's classification or industry, you can do this by selecting the appropriate categories. You can also provide a more detailed description of your business - such as what you do and the the services you provide - in the "Description" field or on your company website.
  • Location names — Unless the official name of your business includes the name of your city, town or other geographic indicator, adding superfluous location terms to the business title violates our guidelines:
    • [Example title violation] Fly Fishing Frankie's Ltd. Fishtown
    • [Example title violation] Fly Fishing Frankie's Ltd. in Market Place Shopping Mall
    Note: To indicate the location of your business, please use the appropriate fields marked "Street Address," "City/Town" and "Postal Code." Adding location-specific information in the title of your listing is not necessary since our system automatically uses your address details to determine the search queries for which your listings would be geographically relevant. If you're concerned that your business is difficult to find or part of a shopping mall or complex, you can provide users with further guidance about where to find you by adding that information in the "Description" field.
  • Phone numbers and websites — Phone numbers and website URLs should not appear in your business title. These details should only be entered into their respective fields in your Google Places listing. The following examples of titles violate our quality guidelines:
    • [Example title violation] Fly Fishing Frankie's Ltd. (555) 555-5555
    • [Example title violation] Fly Fishing Frankie's Ltd. www.example_for_fishingfreddys.com
  • Capitalization and Punctuation — Some users may be tempted to use special characters or excessive capitalization in the business title to draw attention to their listing. However, this practice is not compliant with our quality guidelines:
    • [Example title violation] FLY FISHING FRANKIE'S LTD.
    • [Example title violation] **!!**Fly Fishing Frankie's Ltd.**!!**
    Note: In order to ensure that the Google Places business listing results are useful and easy to read, please refrain from using visual gimmicks. Business titles, as well as addresses, should always use standard capitalization and punctuation.
The above examples may not cover all cases of business title violations, but we hope we were able to highlight some of the common mistakes we've seen. By avoiding these errors when setting up your business listing title, as well as reading through the rest of our Google Places quality guidelines, you should be in good shape to create an optimal and compliant listing.

If you realize that your existing listing is not compliant with our quality guidelines, we encourage you to sign in to your Google Places account to make the required changes and avoid getting temporarily suspended for violating the guidelines.

We hope you find this information helpful, and if you have further questions about business listing titles, visit our Google Places help forum.

Posted by Claudia Pfalzer, Local Search Quality
URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/10/tips-for-creating-free-business-listing.html

[G] VP8 Documentation and Test Vector Contributions

Posted: 14 Oct 2010 01:00 PM PDT

The WebM Open Media Project Blog: VP8 Documentation and Test Vector Contributions

Janne Salonen of the WebM team in Oulu, Finland (formerly On2 Finland) has added a tabular description of the VP8 syntax to the VP8 Bitstream Guide. The new annex provides a concise reference of the elements in the bitstream and we hope will make implementing and testing VP8 decoders easier. The updated document and source can be downloaded from our documentation page.

We're working on more improvements to the bitstream guide and invite other community members to help. As with the VP8 code, we gladly give attribution credit to documentation contributors and have added an AUTHORS file to the bitstream-guide Git repository.

New VP8 Test Vectors

The Oulu team has also produced some new VP8 test vectors. We analyzed a large set of WebM videos and produced two important corner use cases. The first produces the worst-case memory bandwidth (i.e., lots of global motion, all fractional motion vectors). The second produces the worst-case boolean decoder bin rate over dozens of consecutive frames. These vectors have been added to the VP8 test repository. Our team will consider other corner cases in the next batch of streams we add to the repository.

Aki Kuusela is Hantro Embedded Engineering Manager at Google.
URL: http://blog.webmproject.org/2010/10/vp8-documentation-and-test-vector.html

[G] Strike up the band: over 10 million have gone Google with Apps for Education

Posted: 14 Oct 2010 12:23 PM PDT

Official Google Blog: Strike up the band: over 10 million have gone Google with Apps for Education

(Cross-posted on the Google Enterprise Blog)

It was four years ago this month that Google Apps for Education first touched down, right before a pivotal football game between ASU and USC—fatefully enough, two schools that were among the first to move to Google Apps and pave the way for other schools to adopt this "alien technology."

This week at EDUCAUSE we're celebrating with these schools and the thousands of others that make up more than 10 million students, staff, faculty and alumni that are actively using Apps for Education on campus. We figured that nothing was more fitting than a tailgate celebration to toast the colleges and universities that have "gone Google." And of course, it's not really a party without inviting the marching band.



In the last four years we've seen a lot of changes, both to our tools and the general landscape of cloud computing in higher education. According to the 2010 Campus Computing project, nearly 85% of four-year colleges and universities are already using or considering moving to the cloud by offering hosted email to their students. Of those schools that have already made the move, more than 56% of them have gone Google.

As part of this sustained momentum, we've seen the number of active Google Apps for Education users double since last fall, with more than two million new users coming on board since May alone; not to mention the emerging growth we're now seeing in the K-12 space.

Hundreds of schools have made the move to Google Apps just this year, including Gonzaga University, Barnard, Brown University, William and Mary, Villanova University, Georgetown School of Business, Case Western Reserve University, Hawai'i Pacific University, Brandeis University, more than half of the 23 campuses in the California State University system, Morehouse University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Texas A&M Alumni, University of Tennessee Chattanooga, 13 of the SUNY schools, Pace University and Wilfrid Laurier—to name just a few.

The USC Trojan Marching Band helped us give a spirited cheer to the schools who have gone Google and the progress we've seen in the last four years. But like any good commencement address will tell you, this is only the beginning.



Posted by Miriam Schneider, Apps for Education team
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/strike-up-band-over-10-million-have.html

[G] Another Successful Summer for Haiku

Posted: 14 Oct 2010 10:01 AM PDT

Google Open Source Blog: Another Successful Summer for Haiku

For the past four years, the Haiku Project has had both the honor and privilege of being a mentoring organization in Google Summer of Code. This has been a wonderful opportunity for the project, as it exposes us to many young and energetic minds that are interested in developing open source software. Even more exciting, it provides a unique opportunity for the project to generate income while growing a handful of carefully selected students into knowledgeable and potentially long-term contributors.

Seven students were allotted for the Haiku Project in 2010 and of those, five students successfully passed the program! More important than the short-term contributions of code is the fact that the students are now more experienced open source developers -- specifically for Haiku. During the program, one student (Alex Wilson) was granted commit access to the Haiku Project, and several other students have expressed plans to continue contributing in the future. As an open source project that develops an operating system, our pool of active committers is relatively small and being able to embrace new contributors is a wonderful thing.

Student Summaries
Atis Elsts, Implementing IPv6 (Code)
At the moment, IPv6 is not included in default images. However, basic IP address assignment, ICMP, and ping6 are working. Some code, which includes NetServer and ifconfig has yet to be merged and is accessible at Atis's github account: haikuipv6.
Atis plans to continue working on the existing problems in the network stack (e.g., #6502) and to eventually bring IPv6 to full working status.

Janito Vaqueiro Ferreira Filho, Implementing ext3 support (Code)
Ext3 Indexed Directory Lookup was committed in r37295 and was needed for implementing read support. For write support, the basics of journaling is implemented, but needs more thorough testing. The majority of his code was committed earlier as r38573. In addition to working on ext support, Janito fixed some issues relating to BFS and the block cache (r37899, r38103).

Christopher Humphries, Improving and Extending Media Player (Code)
Shortly after the start of the coding period, Christopher received news that his university had retracted their word on accepting Google Summer of Code as a valid internship. This necessitated changes to his project proposal -- specifically reducing the scope of the project to DVD support. Originally, he started out making a media plug-in, but finally opted for an add-on. The latter provided better interfacing and control for applications -- mostly because the library needs path information. Other problems cropped up, such as the absence of a demuxing node and faulty mpeg decoding. This led to the realization that the kit needs more work before it can do the job. Christopher has even presented some thoughts to the community: Pitching Media Kit ideas, Alternatives to plug-in sniffing, and A true streaming equivalent of BDataIO. His code is hosted on his github account, Haiku-DVD-addon.

Christophe Huriaux, Creating Services Kit core elements (Code)
As mentioned in his recent blog post, the Services Kit is now capable of handling HTTP requests (file uploading, POST requests, authentication, cookie support, etc). It supports asynchronous as well as synchronous requests. Christophe has also started updating WebPositive to utilize Services Kit. This provides a real world test-bed scenario and will improve WebPositive by replacing the cURL backend with native API.

Alex Wilson, Taking the Haiku Layout API public, (Code)
This involved archiving of BLayout, BLayoutItem and subclasses (#5525), deriving BLayout from BLayoutItem (#6407), and updating numerous applications to use the new Layout API. In addition to his original proposal, numerous archiving features were implemented as part of #6256 (BArchiver, BUnarchiver, BArchivable). Alex was also granted commit access halfway through the coding period! In the future, he plans to working towards making the Layout API suitable for public consumption.

In closing, many thanks to Google for sponsoring this program and allowing the Haiku Project to participate, to Carol Smith, Google Summer of Code Program Administrator, and to our mentors who helped make this endeavor successful. All in all, this was another successful year for Haiku. Congratulations to all who have participated!

By Matt Madia, Haiku Administrator for Google Summer of Code

This post is cross posted from the Haiku blog, where there are more details about our participation in this year's Google Summer of Code.
URL: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2010/10/another-successful-summer-for-haiku.html

[G] Tips for partners: LinusTechTips shares how he found his niche

Posted: 14 Oct 2010 09:50 AM PDT

YouTube Blog: Tips for partners: LinusTechTips shares how he found his niche

In our series of partner optimization tips, we covered metadata with Betty from BettysKitchen, how to use playlists and annotations with Zack from ZackScott, and how to find your niche and analyze the performance of your videos. Now, we're excited to have Linus from LinusTechTips show us how he found his niche with videos on unboxing tech products and how he uses YouTube Insight to track the performance of his videos.



It took Linus some time and multiple attempts before he found his niche as a "Professional Unboxer." When Linus started his channel, he began to use YouTube Insight to figure out which of his videos were most popular. He realized he had found his specialty when he got thousands of views on his unboxing of the Radeon 5770 Direct X11 video card, which to this day remains one of his highest viewed videos. Since Linus joined the partner program in 2009, his focus has been making videos on product unboxings and reviews. He specializes in unboxing video cards, like the GeForce GTS 450 and the Radeon 5750. He also has a great line of custom t-shirts for the unboxing enthusiast. This one is a crowd favorite.







You can also check this video out on his Watch Page. Let us know in the comments section of Linus' video if you have great tips to share on using YouTube Insight or if you have feedback for Linus. We'd also love to hear how your videos have been impacted once you have used some of these tips to analyze the performance of your videos.



Julie Kikla and Mahin Ibrahim, Account Managers, YouTube Partnerships recently watched "Movie Trailer Proposal."


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/5-UZRL6zVLM/tips-for-partners-linustechtips-shares.html

[G] Clustering Related Queries Based on User Intent

Posted: 14 Oct 2010 07:03 AM PDT

Official Google Research Blog: Clustering Related Queries Based on User Intent

Posted by Jayant Madhavan and Alon Halevy

People today use search engines for all their information needs, but when they pose a particular search query, they typically have a specific underlying intent. However, when looking at any query in isolation, it might not entirely be clear what the underlying intent is. For example, when querying for mars, a user might be looking for more information about the planet Mars, or the planets in the solar system in general, or the Mars candy bar, or Mars the Roman god of war. The ambiguity in intent is most pronounced for queries that are inherently ambiguous and for queries about prominent entities about which there are various different types of information on the Internet. Given such ambiguity, modern search engines try to complement their search results with lists of related queries that can be used to further explore a particular intent.

In a recent paper, we explored the problem of clustering the related queries as a means of understanding the different intents underlying a given user query. We propose an approach that combines an analysis of anonymized document-click logs (what results do users click on) and query-session logs (what sequences of queries do users pose in a search session). We model typical user search behavior as a traversal of a graph whose nodes are related queries and clicked documents. We propose that the nodes in the graph, when grouped based on the probability of a typical user visiting them within a single search session, yield clusters that correspond to distinct user intents.

Our results show that underlying intents (clusters of related queries) almost always correspond to well-understood, high-level concepts. For example, for mars, in addition to re-constructing each of the intents listed earlier, we also find distinct clusters grouping queries about NASA's missions to the planet, about specific interest in life on Mars, as well as a Japanese comic series, and a grocery chain named Mars. We found that our clustering approach yields better results than earlier approaches that either only used document-click or only query-session information. More details about our proposed approach and an analysis of the resulting clusters can be found in our paper that was presented at the International World Wide Web conference earlier this year.
URL: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2010/10/clustering-relate-queries-based-on-user.html
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)