Google to Sell Ads on Clear Channel's Radio Stations

Google made a deal with Clear Channel, the largest radio station group owner in the US, to sell audio ads. "The deal will run for several years, and will give Google access to just under 5 percent of Clear Channel's commercial time. That will include 30-second spots on all of Clear Channel's 675 stations during all programs and all times of the day, executives at both companies said in interviews yesterday," reports New York Times.

Google acquired dMarc Broadcasting, a radio ads platform, last year and integrated it in Google AdWords. They already sell ads on more than 800 radios, including XM satellite radios, but this is the first major test for Google audio ads.

Google wants to create a platform that allows advertisers to create and sell ads online and offline from the same place. And that includes TV ads, newspaper ads, display ads - everything managed from the same Google AdWords, using similar metrics, concepts and targets. In a recent interview from Wired, Eric Schmidt said one way to look at Google is "as an advertising system".

Visualizing Human Feelings

We Feel Fine is the name of the project that gathers texts expressing human emotions from blogs. "Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.)."

We Feel Fine aggregated a database of millions of human feelings that can be explored by restricting the view to several parameters like the age, gender, or the geographical location of the post author. In of the views (called "madness"), each feeling is represented by a colorful particle that moves around the screen.

"The Madness movement, with its network of many tiny colorful particles, was designed to echo the human world. Seen from afar, Madness presents a massive number of individual particles, each colored and sized uniquely, each flying wildly around the screen, proclaiming its own individuality. At this level, Madness presents a bird's eye view of humanity – like standing atop a skyscraper and peering down at the street. People bustle to and fro, darting in and out of shops, hailing taxis, falling in love, laughing, handling personal crises. From the skyscraper, the people below are like ants – their words cannot be heard, their facial features cannot be seen, and the notion of individuality is hard to recognize. At this level, each particle seems insignificant."

There's also a view that displays the most common feelings. Right now, they are: "I feel..." better, bad, good, right, guilty, sick, (the) same.

But the most interesting views are "Mobs" and "Metrics" that show the most representative feelings for a population (for example, men aged 20-29 from UK) or the most representative population for a feeling. The system shows that two times more women than men feel happy at the moment.

Why There's No DoubleClick Ad on Google.com

John Battelle tells Google's story in "The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture". An interesting episode happens in 1999, when Google still tried to find a business model and when DoubleClick's banners didn't seem the right way to make money.

Near the end of 1999, Google Inc. had thirty-nine employees, most of whom were engineers of one stripe or another. Omid Kordescani, Google's newly hired sales chief, was still plowing the fields for enterprise deals, but they were few and far between. With more than $500,000 (and growing) going our the door each month and less than $20 million in the bank, you didn't need a Stanford PhD to do the math: the company needed a business model that worked.

There was always the failback of simply running banners on Google's prodigious traffic — one deal with DoubleClick, an ad network that specialized in serving graphical banners, would probably net the company millions of dollars. But that felt like a sellout — DoubleClick's ads were often gaudy and irrelevant. They represented everything Page and Brin felt was wrong with the Internet "They didn't want to turn the Web site into the online version of Forty-second Street," recalls investor and director Michael Moritz.

Instead, the young executive team decided to try a more focused approach—it would sell text-only ads to sponsors targeting particular keywords. When you searched for "Ford cars," for example, an ad would appear at the top of the results for Ford Motor Company. These first advertisements were sold on a cost per thousand (CPM) model. (…)

Turns out the ads worked well enough, but they didn't scale. Revenue was limited by Kordestani's ability to sell, and despite his talents, it was difficult to book enough orders to create a healthy business. "It didn't generate much money," Brin recalls, referring to the program as a "hand-patched life preserver." DoubleClick, he adds, was the ocean liner Google would swim to should the life preserver fail.

Infinite Scrolling in Google Search

If you hate clicking on "next" in Google search, but you don't want to set a higher number of results in the preferences because the page loads slowly, this Greasemonkey script might be for you (requires Greasemonkey for Firefox). It loads the next page of results as you scroll down so it gives the illusion of "infinite scrolling".

This is a Japanese script as it was created by two people from Japan. One downside of the script is that it opens search results in a new window/tab, but removing that bit of code causes weird effects.

If you want a native "infinite scrolling" in Google, try SearchMash and keep pressing the space bar to automatically fetch the next results page. Microsoft's image search is also a good implementation of the concept and probably the first major search engine that used "infinite scrolling" (at first, Windows Live Search used it for web search results as well, but the feature was removed).

Call Google 411 Wherever You Are

Google launched last week a directory assistance service that uses voice recognition to automatically answer queries about the US local businesses. The service is free, but if you're not in the US or Canada, it's not very easy to see how well it works.

Fortunately, Yahoo Messenger lets you call toll-free US numbers that start with 800, 888, 877, or 866. This is a fairly recent feature that was added in Yahoo Messenger 8.1. All you need to do is call 8004664411 and follow the directions.

Skype also offers free calls to toll-free phone numbers, but Google's number is always busy.

If you discover some interesting bugs or funny answers, record the conversation using a software like SoliCall or Audacity*, upload it to odeo and post a link in the comments.

* Most sound cards have the option to record mix that captures the output signal from wave channel AND input signal from microphone channel. In Windows XP, go to Start/Run, type sndvol32 and in Preferences toggle the "Recording" option and select "Stereo Mix" (make sure you select in the main dialog as well). Then you can record the sound using with Audacity or other audio editor.

Google Pays $3.1 Billion for DoubleClick

I don't know if there's a single ad blocker or cookie filtering program that doesn't include doubleclick.net in its black list. For me, DoubleClick is associated with ugly animated banners and tracking cookies. But since today, DoubleClick is a part of Google's empire and will help it expand in the display ads area, where Google failed to attract too many advertisers.

"Web advertising leader Google Inc. said on Friday it has agreed to acquire DoubleClick Inc., a top online advertising network, for $3.1 billion, beating out other major Internet players with its bid."

The major Internet player outbid by Google was Microsoft and that was probably the explanation for this huge value paid by Google for the largest and most ungoogly acquisition ever made.

"Acquiring DoubleClick expands Google's business far beyond algorithm-driven ad auctions into a relationship-based business with Web publishers and advertisers. (...) DoubleClick's exchange is different from the ad auctions that Google uses on its networks because the exchange is open to any Web publisher or ad network — not just the sites in Google’s network," notes New York Times.

But what is DoubleClick anyway?

DoubleClick is a provider of internet ad serving software. Its clients include agencies, marketers (Universal McCann Interactive, AKQA etc.) and publishers who service customers such as Microsoft, General Motors, Coca-Cola, Motorola, L'Oreal, Palm, Visa USA, Nike, Carlsberg and many more. (...)

DoubleClick was founded in 1995 as Internet Advertising Network by Kevin O'Connor and Dwight Merriman. DoubleClick was initially engaged in the online media business, meaning it helped web sites sell advertising to marketers. In 1997 the company began offering the online ad serving and management technology they had developed to other publishers as the DART services. During the internet downturn, DoubleClick divested its media business, and today DoubleClick is purely involved in ad management from the technology end — uploading ads and reporting on their performance. (...)

DoubleClick is sometimes linked with the controversy over spyware because browser cookies are set to track users as they travel from website to website and record what commercial advertisements they view and select while browsing. However, the company maintains that it is important to understand the difference between DoubleClick's ad serving tags and the spyware/adware companies.

Update. In Google's press release, Sergey Brin says:
"It has been our vision to make Internet advertising better - less intrusive, more effective, and more useful. Together with DoubleClick, Google will make the Internet more efficient for end users, advertisers, and publishers." And what about the lack of intrusiveness?

Switch from Google Maps to Google Earth

Oftentimes I find something interesting in Google Maps and want to see it more detailed in Google Earth. You could try to repeat the search in Google Earth, but that's not the best idea.

To move to the same location click on "Link to this page", go to the address bar and copy the value of the ll parameter from a Google Maps address. Then type the value in Google Earth's search box. Here's an example:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&q=Paris,+France&layer=&om=1&
z=14&ll=52.046737,-0.198269&spn=0.024229,0.080338

If you want to save some clicks, after clicking "Link to this page", add "&output=kml" at the end of the URL and hit Enter. A dialog will ask you to open or save a KML file. Choose to open the file in Google Earth.

There's even a bookmarklet that automates the process. Bookmark this link or drag it to your bookmarks toolbar. Next time you want to switch to Google Earth, just click on the bookmarklet.

View in Google Earth

A Simplified Version of Google's Spell Checker

Peter Norvig (from Google) explains in a detailed article how to write in 20 lines of Python code a spell checker almost as good as the one used by Google to show the famous "did you mean" corrections. Well, at least for one-word corrections.

We will read a text file, holmes.txt (that I happened to have on my laptop) which is a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories (from Project Gutenberg) consisting of about 100,000 words. We then extract the individual words from the file (using the function words, which converts everything to lowercase, so that "the" and "The" will be the same). Next we train a probability model, which is a fancy way of saying we count how many times each word occurs. (...)

Now let's look at the problem of enumerating the possible corrections c of a given word w. It is common to talk of the edit distance between two words: the number of edits it would take to turn one into the other. An edit can be a deletion (remove one letter), a transposition (swap adjacent letters), an alteration (change one letter to another) or an insertion (add a letter). (...)

The literature on spelling correction claims that 80 to 95% of spelling errors are an edit distance of 1 from the target.

A simple way to define the error model was to say that "all known words of edit distance 1 are infinitely more probable than known words of edit distance 2, and infinitely less probable than a known word of edit distance 0". From all the candidates for the correction, you can choose the most frequent word.

In Peter Norvig's tests, this simple algorithm returned correct answers in more than 80% of the cases. Of course that Google has more data than the holmes.txt file (it crawls the web, right?) and has access to a huge list of queries and refinements that could improve the algorithm, but this is an example of a simple yet powerful program.

3D Buildings in Google's Street Maps

Google Maps adds a new dimension to buildings in the street maps of more than 30 important cities from the US (like New York or Boston) and Japan. Frank Taylor from the unofficial Google Earth Blog argues that they're not yet 3D. "You can't rotate or tilt your view, so it's 2D. But, the buildings have shaded 3D-like projections from an angle so you get an idea of height and shape of the buildings."


This is, in fact, Google Earth's building layer. To see it, go to the layers sidebar and enable "3D buildings".


Google Earth's layers contain a lot of useful information that enhance the satellite imagery: road names, airports, parks, populated places, pictures and more. The cool thing is that they reside on Google's servers, so you don't need to update Google Earth to see new information. Google Maps could become much more useful if it included these overlays.

The Sad Story of Darfur in Google Earth

"Girl with traumatized baby sister. The baby has not made a sound since the day their parents were slaughtered and the village burned."

When you hear about sad stories from far away, they rarely touch you. It's hard to be impressed by the sufferance of someone who doesn't have too much in common with you.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum presents in a Google Earth layer the consequences of a conflict from Darfur, a region situated in Sudan.

BBC tells the story:

Sudan's government and the pro-government Arab militias are accused of war crimes against the region's black African population, although the UN has stopped short of calling it genocide. (...)

The conflict began in the arid and impoverished region early in 2003 after a rebel group began attacking government targets, saying the region was being neglected by Khartoum. The rebels say the government is oppressing black Africans in favour of Arabs. (...)

[The government] admits mobilising "self-defence militias" following rebel attacks but denies any links to the Janjaweed, accused of trying to "cleanse" black Africans from large swathes of territory. Refugees from Darfur say that following air raids by government aircraft, the Janjaweed ride into villages on horses and camels, slaughtering men, raping women and stealing whatever they can find.

"I was living with my family in Tawila and going to school when one day the Janjaweed entered the town and attacked the school. We tried to leave the school but we heard noises of bombing in the town and started running in all directions. All the girls were scared. The Janjaweed entered the school and caught some girls and raped them in the class rooms. I was raped by four men inside the school. When they left they told us they would take care of all of us black people and clean Darfur for good."

The refugees, their destroyed villages and a disturbing story - in a Google Earth layer (requires Google Earth, obviously).

Opera 9.20 - More Homepages at Your Fingertips

The latest version Opera (a free browser from Norway) brings the speed dial from your phone to your browser. You can configure a start page with nine boxes where you can add frequently visited sites. The page shows up everytime you open a new tab, but the sites added to the start page can be opened by simply clicking on Ctrl-[number from 1 to 9].

Opera shows real-time thumbnails of the selected pages and lets you reload them at a custom interval so it's a cool way to monitor changes.

There's also a link to Opera developer tools, a list of bookmarklets that add some of the best features from Firefox's DOM Inspector and the most popular extension for developers: Web Developer Toolbar. You can inspect, edit or remove DOM nodes; view, edit or disable stylesheets; view HTTP headers and cookies. It looks pretty impressive for a JavaScript bookmarklet.

Opera finally becomes a normal browser: if you enter a query in the address bar (something that's not an URL or a single word), Opera performs a search.

Scan a File Using the Top Antivirus Software

If you get a file from a site you don't know very well (like a game or a screensaver), the first thing you should do is scan it using an antivirus. The problem is that your antivirus might not be very good or might not include the signature of the trojan included in the file you've just downloaded. So a good idea is to have a second opinion, but you can't install more than one antivirus (unless you disable the real-time protection).

VirusTotal is a site where you can upload a file smaller than 10 MB and it will be scanned by a large number of antivirus software (the current number is 31), including: Kaspersky, BitDefender, F-Secure, Panda. The file will not be scanned instantly, but you'll have to wait a short time (usually around one minute), depending on site's load. You'll get a report like:


If you see conflicting responses, look at the most trustworthy engines (some tests) and at the number of engines that report a virus. In the situation depicted in the screenshot, I can safely assume that the file is clean.

The service is available by email too: send a mail to scan@virustotal.com with the subject SCAN. If you use Gmail, you'll have to rename executable files (for example, from setup.exe to setup.ex1) to be able to send them.

A similar service is Jotti's malware scan, that has a bigger limit for the file size: 15 MB, but uses less antivirus engines.

{ Thank you, Google! }

Open-Source OCR Software, Sponsored by Google

Google sponsors the development of an open-source OCR software at the IUPR research group. "OCRopus is a state-of-the-art document analysis and OCR system, featuring pluggable layout analysis, pluggable character recognition, statistical natural language modeling, and multi-lingual capabilities."

"The goal of the project is to advance the state of the art in optical character recognition and related technologies, and to deliver a high quality OCR system suitable for document conversions, electronic libraries, vision impaired users, historical document analysis, and general desktop use," explains Thomas Breuel, who leads the project.

The software is partly based on Tesseract, the best open source OCR engine available for now. While the project is expected to be released at the end of next year and will be used for Google's book scanning project, the team has some interesting applications in mind:

* a web service interface
* PDF, camera, and screen OCR
* integration with desktop search tools: Beagle, Spotlight, Google Desktop

The most popular OCR software are ABBYY FineReader, Omnipage, Readiris and Presto OCR, but they're pretty expensive (starting at $100). A decent solution to perform OCR on a document is Microsoft Office Document Imaging, included in Microsoft Office XP/2007. Microsoft Office OneNote 2007 also lets you OCR imported images. A free online alternative is Scanr, a site that lets you digitize documents by sending a mobile phone photo by email.

Towards a New Google News

Agence France-Presse (AFP) filed a suit against Google in 2005 because Google News used snippets and thumbnails from AFP's stories. Last week, the two companies settled the copyright lawsuit, without disclosing the terms of the agreement.

The interesting thing here is that Google didn't pay AFP to use snippets from its news stories (which are covered by fair use), but for the full content of the articles.

Google said the deal "will enable the use of AFP's newswire content in innovative, new ways that will dramatically improve the way users experience newswire content on the Internet".

Last year, Google made a similar deal with Associated Press. "The license in this agreement provides for new uses of original AP content for features and products we will introduce in the future. We are very excited about the innovative new products we will build with full access to this content," said at that time a Google spokeswoman.

So we know that Google builds a new version of Google News that includes full content from AP and AFP. Currently, Google News automatically aggregates news stories from thousands of sources, groups related news and shows snippets and thumbnails, similar to the web search results.

We also know that there's a product called Universal Search, that could integrate news results into standard search results. Google Blog Search and Google News seem closer than ever.

Philipp Lenssen found that Google tested a prototype which allows "other news sources, and organizations and individuals mentioned in news stories to debate specific points."

So how do you think the new Google News will look like, will Google choose the Yahoo News path and what do you expect to see in an "universal search"?

AdSense for Newsletters?

Google tested a way to embed contextual ads in email newsletters, but it didn't release this feature to the public. A new patent ("Serving content-targeted ADS in e-mail, such as e-mail newsletters"), granted to Google today, describes some details about the process:

Serving content-targeted ads in e-mail newsletters is a potential source of a large number of additional quality page-views for advertisers. (...) Regardless of the system used to serve ads with e-mail, such as e-mail newsletters, it may be desirable to (i) obtain e-mail content information so that useful, content-relevant, ads may be served, and (ii) provide ads in a format that can be rendered on and supported by a wide variety of e-mail clients/readers, or at least prevalent e-mail clients/readers. This may be challenging since many, if not most, of the more popular Web-based e-mail clients strip out IFRAMEs and JavaScript. (...)

The present invention may be used to serve content-targeted ads with e-mail messages, such as HTML e-mail messages, and may do so without needing to use IFRAMEs or JavaScript. The present invention may do so by (i) having the document publisher include a unique content identifier in the content, (ii) having a client device pass the unique content identifier to a content-relevant ad server in a content-relevant ad request, and (iii) having the content-relevant ad server use the unique contend identifier to identify previously registered content for purposes of determining content-relevant ads.

So their system relies on images or dynamically-generated image maps that serve ads related to the content of the newsletter. But many mail clients and webmail apps also block embedded images (unless you explicitly allow them).

A post from Search Engine Roundtable mentioned last year that "some Google AdSense publishers are allowed to place ads within email newsletters or other emails, with permission from Google". An advertiser confirms: "We have had AdSense ads in our newsletters for over a year now. These ads come in various formats and are essentially served by an image server".

ToDo List for Google Calendar

Update (July 27 2007): As always with these Greasemonkey scripts, any minor change in a site's code can make the script stop working. The ToDo list described below doesn't work anymore, so you could try a similar one.

Google Personalized Homepage has a to-do gadget, who'd be be better suited in Google Calendar. As there's no option to add gadgets in Google Calendar, someone created an even simpler version as a Greasemonkey script.

While you can't add priorities, sort the events by date or change their order, it's handy to have a list of events next to the calendar. The ToDo list is saved in Google Calendar as fake events, so you'll be able to see it if you use other computers (you'll need to have Firefox + Greasemonkey, though).


How to add the ToDo list? First install Greasemonkey for Firefox, restart the browser and then install this script.

A Batch of Gmail Accounts, Accidentally Disabled

Next time when you can't access Gmail, be happy that Gmail is down only for a few minutes. Other people have to live days without their Gmail accounts (and you know it's hard to do that).

Last week, the Gmail team realized that a bunch of spammers found a temporary home at gmail.com. Says the Gmail team: "We have been actively investigating a batch of accounts that were accidentally disabled and are currently in the process of re-enabling these accounts. This error occurred in an effort to target a large network of spammers to keep them out of the Gmail system and keep your inbox free from spam. We apologize for this inconvenience and appreciate your patience as we re-enable these accounts as quickly as possible."

Collateral damages, you'll say. But not if you're one of the poor souls who had the misfortune to be the target of Gmail's team raid. While some of the accounts were disabled, others didn't have links to email attachments.

My account is readable.. like i can logon. but i can't download any of the attachments. i have two huge presentations coming up and all the files are on my account. i trust google more than a usbkey soo i always have my files on my account. now i can't even get them.. and i can't get any one to send them to me. so please please fix it soon. "lockdown on sector 6" is what i get and i abide by google's terms of use.

Benedikt ("benedictus" means "blessed" in Latin), the wise soul from Gmail's Google Group, saves the day:

I think this extremely unfortunate event shows us the danger of having all the important information in one place, a place that depends on the functionality of one large software package, such as GoogleMail. (...)

What we experience right now is such a failure and most of the posts in this topic that have been posted before this one show us the consequences that can have. So let us hope that the capable engineers of Google will succeed in restoring GoogleMail's full functionatlity as they have succeded in building up the virtual world of collaboration, information and communication that has made Google what it is today.

While Gmail is a useful web application, you shouldn't use it to store mission-critical files or information. And if you do, make sure you have backups: store your files on different storage mediums, forward your Gmail messages to other accounts or pray that Gmail team doesn't have a bad day and disables your account. If you see an error message like "Lockdown in sector 4 (or 6)", complain to Google.

Google says they promptly re-enabled the affected accounts, but there are still people who can't access Gmail. And might "move their operations" to other sites, if the Gmail team continues to treat them like that.

I've been locked out of my original email for a full 7 days come midnight. I'm also locked out of anything google associated, so I can't post new content to my blog, nor check AdSense income. I thought I would have to wait the standard 5 days and now I realize my account wasn't having password issues, this was a long standing issue that it seems they knew about.

Which makes me upset enough to move my operations from google; I hope everyone else does the same...this is the only free email service I have known with regular outages, shutdowns and no customer support. The last time I lost access to my email was 3/14/06, my birthday no less...luckily, I got it back in 24 hours. Now, it's been 7 days.

Eric Schmidt's Confessions

Photo from NY Times, CC-licensed by Jakob Lodwick.

Fred Vogelstein publishes an interview from 2005 with Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO. It's an exciting conversation that reveals a lot from Google's internal combustion, the long debates between the three key people who run Google, how decisions are made and a difficult moment when Google was very close to split-up.

"Sergey is brilliant, pulsing, right. Larry is brilliant and deep. So Sergey is -- what is it, a supernova, he's exploding his ideas. So with Sergey you listen, you know, he'll be sitting there and he'll be doing something random, right, not paying attention at all, and then all of a sudden he makes this comment that is distinctly different from everyone else and is very incisive. It is how his brain works. Larry would write a 30-page paper on his GPS idea overnight and not sleep."

In the interview, Mr. Schmidt defines himself as the "normal person" from Google's triumvirate.

"I used to give this speech about how you control risk, and the best way to control risk is to have the smartest people working on the problem, and businesses are about risk. An example would be in my first year the question had to do with the development of these advertising networks. Overture was doing well. Would we partner with them? Would we compete with them? We had some preliminary conversations partnering with them. They wanted to buy us. And there were a number of times when I frankly had no idea what to do. But the solutions didn't come as a result of me sitting in a room and inventing it. I don't think Larry and Sergey sat in a room by themselves either. It was an iteration that involved the interactions of five or ten people over a period of time. And the characteristic of such group decisions done right is enormous buy-in."

"The most acute disagreement was over the original deal with AOL (in 2002). The reason was that Google did not have enough cash to fulfill the guaranteed payout in the contract (in the future). And the actual sequence is quite interesting because you see the beginnings of the management structure. So in the first place, the deal itself was a very good idea, we all agreed to it. Because the AOL people were very smart, and because Google was a new business, they negotiated very, very cleverly. (...) And I remember one day where we argued to the point where I actually stopped the argument. I thought it would split the company. It was the closest point -- and this is now four years ago, three and a half years go -- it was the closest point I ever saw literally the company falling in two."

Batch Upload Files to Google Docs

You'd think that Google considered Docs & Spreadsheets important enough to make it easy to import files. Or to export files. You can do that one file at a time, but it becomes tiresome if you have a lot of files.

Fortunately, the latest version of Google Toolbar for Firefox has a feature that lets you drag and drop files to your browser and they are automatically uploaded to Google Docs. To upload more files at a time, go to Windows Explorer or other file manager, select your files and drag them in Firefox.

To activate the feature, to go to Google Docs & Spreadsheets after installing the toolbar. You'll get a prompt that asks you if you want to enable the feature. Alternatively, click on Settings / Options and enable "Docs & Spreadsheets".



Related:
Upload files using drag and drop in Firefox

Google, the Supercomputer

BusinessWeek had a nice collage titled "The many faces of Google" that illustrated 8 facets of Google: search engine, innovation machine, ad broker, media mogul, world's biggest computer, phone company, a provider of better Internet and an artificial intelligence system. While some of these perspectives are speculations or just future plans, it's interesting to see Google as a supercomputer you have limited access to.

Most people still think of Web sites such as Google as places to go. Wrong. That's the old media model. In reality, every click is a command for some computer somewhere in the world. (...) Indeed, CEO Eric Schmidt says that Google essentially is a huge, distributed supercomputer "doing all sorts of things over a fiber-optic network that eventually are services available to end-users." Before long, Googling will mean not just searching for something, but getting ALMOST anything done online.

The New York Times estimated last year that the Googleplex and its server farms contain 450,000 servers. "The rate at which the Google computing system has grown is as remarkable as its size. In March 2001, when the company was serving about 70 million Web pages daily, it had 8,000 computers, according to a Microsoft researcher granted anonymity to talk about a detailed tour he was given at one of Google's Silicon Valley computing centers. By 2003 the number had grown to 100,000."

Personalized Google Video Search

Google continues its effort to personalize search results, this time with Google Video. After adding a page of recommended videos, now the search results can be personalized. For an ambiguous query like "grid", the top results were:


After tailoring the results to my interests (using my previous queries, ratings, videos watched), there's a big change. In-grid's music videos are no longer in the top results (the two videos were moved to #6 and #7). Meanwhile, the video "Grid-based Integrated Bioinformatics Systems for High Throughput" was moved from #7 to #1, "iClaustron: Open Source Grid Cluster Storage Controller" was moved from #11 to #2, "Pioneering the Laptop: Engineering the GRiD Compass" was moved from #29 to #3 and "Warren Miller's OFF THE GRID" (the only video from the top 5 that is not about computers) was downgraded from #1 to #4.

Your Notebooks Are Available from Google Search

If you use Google Notebook, you'll find a new link at the top of search results pages: "My notebooks". There are two possible situations:

* you have the extension/plug-in. In this case, it's the same as if you clicked on "Open Notebook".

* you don't have the extension/plug-in and Google emulates the interface. You can copy search results in the notebook by clicking "Note this" next to the snippet, manage your notebooks or type some text in a new note.

Google Voice Local Search

Finally a new service at Google Labs: some people were really worried that Google's innovation went down the stairs.

Google Voice Local Search lets you search for local businesses from any phone and for free. If you're in the US, call 1-800-GOOG-411 and say what you want to find. Here are some of the features:

* You can find a business listing by category. Just say "pizza," for example.
* You can send the listing details to your mobile phone via SMS.
* The service is fully automated, so it doesn't rely on human operators.
* It connects you directly to the business, free of charge.

In the US, 411 is the phone number for local directory assistance, but it's pretty expensive (more than $1). 1-800-FREE-411 is a free service that uses speech recognition to process your request and ads to monetize it.

Google tested several years ago Google Voice Search, a service that let you search Google by voice, but it's not available anymore. There's also Google SMS: send an SMS to 466453 with your query and get business listings.

If you're in the US, which 411 is better: 1-800-FREE-411 or 1-800-GOOG-411?

Update: This service has been around for a while (it was known as 520-Find). A post from October 2006 gives some interesting overview of Google 411:

Call 1 877 466 4411 (1 877 GOOG 411) and try your luck with two voices that I've come to think of as Mr. Google Smooth and Mr. Google Hawking. They won't tell you who they are, but they seem to be the voices of Google Local Search. (...)

If you call, nothing announces that you've reached Google, but a slightly arch and apparently human Mr. Smooth informs you your call might be recorded and then asks for a city and state. Mr. Hawking then cuts in, slow, methodical, and synthetic, to repeat your query. All good? Mr. Smooth then asks for a business type or name. He does all the traffic direction--the prompting for commands, the suggestions of ways you can interact, the questions. Mr. Hawking just gets to read back your queries and read out the searches.

Actual search results described below the fold, but just some general remarks: the voice recognition is pretty good, even with some "foreign" words, but not all English words.

JotSpot to Open Again Soon?

After being acquired by Google, JotSpot was pretty low-profile. Now there's a new JotSpot help center hosted at Google.com and a new JotSpot group. From the help files:

"Now that Google has acquired JotSpot, all accounts are free. In addition, all accounts have been upgraded to unlimited users and unlimited pages."

Reading some questions from the help center gives you the impression that there's no integration between JotSpot's wikis and Google's products. There also funny texts like:

"Yes, JotSpot does support Apple Mac computers. For the most part, JotSpot will work with Safari. Because we do not test with Safari, JotSpot does not officially support it."

{ Thanks, Óscar Silván. }

Stellarium - Look at the Sky

Stellarium is a free software that renders the sky from a configurable position. The application, available for Windows, Mac and Linux, creates an immersive environment thanks to the 3D full-screen rendering and the realistic photos. Stellarium lets you see stars, constellations, planets, nebulas and is a great way to learn their names. You can search the name of a planet or star and the application even auto-completes it for you.

You're the master of time, so you can make it run slower, faster or even stop it; you're the master of space, so you can change the position to anywhere you want; you can also control the events by running or recording scripts that simulate eclipses or other astronomical events.

It's very refreshing to use it as a virtual telescope that teaches you to look at the sky and to understand more from its mystery.


Related:
Celestia, space simulator
Google Earth, as seen by a Googler

New Look for Google Ads

Maybe to combat ad blindness or maybe because the new formats are more attractive, Google decided to change some of the ads from Google search results and the content network.

Here are the changes:

* The ads displayed at the top of search results pages for highly competitive keywords have a background (#FFF9DD), instead of a blue background. The new background is so subtle that is almost white and many users might confuse them with the actual search results.

To prevent accidental clicks, "users now need to click on the link in the top line of an ad in order to be taken to an advertiser's site," according to AdWords blog. Until now, you could click anywhere in the ad box, including the blank spaces.


* AdSense ads change the famous "Ads by Gooooogle" branding from a text into an image that contains Google's logo. "After extensive testing and research, we've found that the new formats are not only visually appealing to users, but they also perform even better for publishers and advertisers," explains Leslie Chiang.

Create Personalized Google Maps

Google launched My Maps, a new feature in Google Maps that lets you mark some places on the map and annotate them. Essentially, it's an easy way to create a KML file from Google Maps (until now, the feature was available in Google Earth). To create a map:

* Select one or more places from the map.
* Draw lines and polygons to highlight paths and areas.
* Add descriptions by typing HTML code or using a rich text editor.
* More in this user guide.

Each map will have its own permalink (like this map of Googleplex) and can be exported as KML to see it in Google Earth. Google wants to create a big directory of maps, so if you decide to make your map public, anyone can find it in the search results. The alternative is to make it unlisted, which means the address won't be included in search results, but it will be accessible to anyone who knows it (much like in Picasa Web).


You can find maps created by other people if you search for a local business and click on "see user-created content" at the bottom of the search results. This acts as a search engine for KML files available on the web, so you'll find a lot of KML files from bbs.keyhole.com (Google Earth Community), where you could host your KMLs and get some feedback.

This new feature (available for a long time in Windows Live Maps or in some Google Maps mashups) is also a good way to share more than one place with a single link. You can add placemarks manually or from the search results.

Google China's Unfiltered Related Searches

When it finds the most relevant sites to your query, Google also tries to filter adult sites, especially for general queries. There's a good reason for that: unless your query is explicit, you may not want to see adult sites in search results. Google also filters explicit words from Google Suggest or from related searches.

But not if you use Google China. Here are the related searches for girl at google.com:



If you search for girl at Google China and scroll down to the bottom you'll see different related searches:



Crack at google.com:



Suggestions for the query crack (Google China):



And here's something more language-independent:


So the question would be: why is it acceptable to show these queries in China and not at google.com?

More Ways to Use Google Talk

Google offers more ways to use its instant messaging client. Here's a (supposedly complete) list:

Desktop applications

* Google Talk client - available only in Windows. Distinctive features: voice calls, voicemail, file transfers, Gmail notifications. You can also chat with people from other IM networks using Jabber transports.

* Jabber clients. Google Talk uses Jabber, so any Jabber client can be used to connect to Google's servers. Use this option if you have Linux, Mac or you want an all-in-one instant messenger that lets you talk to your friends from Yahoo Messenger, AIM etc. A nice all-in-one cross-platform instant messenger is Gaim.


Mobile applications

* MGTalk - third-party Java application that includes Gmail notifications.

* Talkonaut - another third-party Java application. Distinctive features: call your contacts (not free), easy way to add contacts from other IM networks.

* OctroTalk - Windows Mobile client for smartphones and Pocket PCs. It supports chatting and talking with other Google Talk users.

* Google Talk for BlackBerry. You can "add, delete and rename contacts, know when [your] friends are online and available, leave conversations and resume them later, copy conversation text into memory and even be notified when a message is being typed."


Web applications

* Google Talk is available in Gmail. This is particularly useful if you want to reply to a mail from someone who is online, but the email is not the most appropriate way (you need an immediate answer). Also Gmail is the place where you can search your chats (add label:chats in front of your query).

* Go to google.com/talk and click on "Launch Google Talk". A pop-up window will open and you'll be able to chat with your friends. Unlike the Gmail version, here you have tabs and a richer interface.

* Add a gadget to Google Personalized Homepage or to Netvibes. Use this option if you have your personalized homepage always open in the background.

* Add it to your browser's sidebar.

In Firefox, click on this link: Google Talk Sidebar to create a bookmark that opens in the sidebar. Now all you have to do is to click on the bookmark to load the gadget.

In Opera, create a new panel by clicking on this link: Google Talk Sidebar. To see the new panel, press F4 and select it from the list.

* There are also third-party sites like Meebo that let you chat with your friends from other IM networks as well.

Google Desktop for Mac

Even though MacOS has Spotlight for desktop search, Apple users wanted Google Desktop. Well, now they have it.

The Mac version only includes the desktop search features and indexes these file types:

- PDF, TXT, and HTML files
- email from Gmail, Apple Mail, and Microsoft Entourage
- iChat transcripts
- Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files
- metadata for audio and video files (such as artist and album information)
- Address Book contacts, system preference panes, and file names for most other files including applications
- file types that have a Spotlight plug-in.

Here are some similarities and differences between Google Desktop and Spotlight:

Similar:
- Google Desktop and Spotlight search your hard disk for information. You can continue to use Spotlight even after you've installed Google Desktop.
- Google Desktop honors Spotlight's "Privacy" settings to prevent certain items from being indexed.

Different:
- Google Desktop lets you search the text of webpages you've visited.
- You can search text from old versions of your documents, or even from deleted files.
- You can search your Gmail files even when you're not online.
- In your browser, search results from your computer are integrated with search results from Google.com.

TUAW installed the software and has a nice review (screenshots included):

Installing Google Desktop is as easy as you would expect it to be: download the DMG, open it, and double click the icon to install. However, the application that launches when you double click that icon is also new. It is the Google Updater, your one stop shop for all Mac Google apps. The Google Updater gives you the opportunity to download and install Google's other Mac apps (Google Earth and Picasa Uploader) while you wait. (...)

Overall, Google Desktop is a worthy addition to any Mac. Does it trump Spotlight? Well, Spotlight has a lot going for it. It is built into the OS, developers can build applications with hooks into it, and there is no need to install anything to get it working. That being said, if you use Google's full suite of products, Google Desktop is the desktop search for you. The integration with Gmail and Google.com is killer.

Google will probably bring the rest of the features and the rest of their apps (Picasa, Google Talk) to Mac, now that they have a dedicated Mac team and a CEO on Apple's board of directors.

Download link - Universal app for MacOSX 10.4+


{ Screenshot licensed as Creative Commons by lostdude. }

Partnership for Google's TV Advertising System

Google has an important partner for the new TV ads system. "EchoStar Communications Corporation and Google announced today that the companies have entered into a partnership agreement to introduce the first automated system for buying, selling, delivering and measuring television ads on EchoStar DISH Network's 125 national satellite programming networks. Google will have access to a portion of DISH Network's advertising inventory that spans across all channels and dayparts. The agreement is the first of its kind for a national pay-TV provider and Google."

The ads are bought through the same interface as AdWords and their performance will be measured by aggregating anonymized metrics from the set-top-boxes. Google will target the ads to the shows and not to their viewers: advertisers will be able to choose the "demographic, daypart and channel and pay only for actual impressions delivered".

Filehippo's Software Update Checker

I was complaining in a post from January that Google Pack could be a very cool package if it had an API that allows it to check a wide variety of software for updates. Google Pack only includes Google's software and a small list of other free applications like Firefox, Adobe Reader, RealPlayer.

Filehippo, one of the best sites where you can download high-quality software, launched Update Checker, a small utility that scans your computer for installed software and displays a list of updates. While the software doesn't require installation, it doesn't check for updates periodically and must be manually launched. Another inconvenient is that you have to manually download and install the updates.

The software is in beta, so it wouldn't surprise if it adds these features in the next versions.

Map a List of Locations from a Google Spreadsheet

Google Spreadsheets has an interesting advantage over Microsoft Excel and other desktop applications: you can publish a spreadsheet and always have the latest version on the web without manually republishing it. Because Google Spreadsheets has an API, you can use the spreadsheet as an easy-to-update structured file always available on the web, as an input for web applications.

Pamela Fox wrote a post on Google Maps Blog that details how to create a map from a Google Spreadsheet that contains geographical information.

First you need to build a spreadsheet that has a header and a list of locations described by title, latitude, longitude. There's a nice batch geocoder that uses Google Maps API and can help you build your spreadsheet: copy the generated text in a text file and import it in Google Spreadsheets.

Once you have the spreadsheet, you need to create the connection with Google Maps. There are three ways to do that:

1. The simple way. This page requires to modify the URL and add the key parameter from the spreadsheet. That's all: no customization, the spreadsheet must have fixed column names, no embedding option.


2. Almost as simple. This wizard lets you customize the map and embed it in your site.


3. The hard way. Use Google Maps API and Google Spreadsheets API to build your own application.

DRM-Free Music from EMI

EMI Music announced it will make "all of its digital repertoire available at a much higher sound quality than existing downloads and free of digital rights management (DRM) restrictions."

"EMI expects that consumers will be able to purchase higher quality DRM-free downloads from a variety of digital music stores within the coming weeks, with each retailer choosing whether to sell downloads in AAC, WMA, MP3 or other unprotected formats of their choice. Music fans will be able to purchase higher quality DRM-free digital music for personal use, and listen to it on a wide range of digital music players and music-enabled phones."

Apple iTunes is the first music store that includes DRM-free songs from EMI, priced at $1.29, compared to $0.99 for the crippled songs. The new songs will have a much better quality (256 Kbps, double from the existing downloads).

Most files downloaded from Apple's music store come with Apple's DRM - called FairPlay. Songs are encoded using FairPlay-encrypted 128 kbit/s AAC streams in an MP4 wrapper and have limitations like:
* number of machines allowed to use purchased music within 24 hours: 5
* only iPod and a small number of Motorola phones can play the files.

In February, Apple's CEO, Steve Jobs, wrote an insightful essay about music and DRM in which he tried to convince music companies that DRM is a bad idea.

Since Apple does not own or control any music itself, it must license the rights to distribute music from others, primarily the "big four" music companies: Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI. These four companies control the distribution of over 70% of the world's music. When Apple approached these companies to license their music to distribute legally over the Internet, they were extremely cautious and required Apple to protect their music from being illegally copied. The solution was to create a DRM system, which envelopes each song purchased from the iTunes store in special and secret software so that it cannot be played on unauthorized devices. (...)

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven't worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music.

Related:
Transcript of Apple's press conference

The Diary of a Noogler

You probably know that Google employees are called Googlers. Well, new Googlers are called Nooglers.

Steve Yegge posted some fragments from the diary of the first days of working at Google, back in 2005.

The first morning we got badged, and through a minor communications mishap, I wound up with an expression that looks exactly as if they'd said: "one... two... ack, there's a tarantula on your crotch! *click*" HR has assured me that I can go get another picture taken if I want. Unfortunately, today I am, for lack of a better word, fat. As in, obese from eating waaaaaay too much on my first day. Bloated. Stuffed. I almost yakked yesterday, actually. They didn't prepare me adequately for the experience of being surrounded by yummy free food. I had approximately the same reaction as the kids when they first got to Willy Wonka's. "Everything's edible, even the staircase!" is I think what Willy said. Roughly. And that's how it feels here at Google HQ.

I'm sitting in a temp office with a temp office mate. Both of us are heading up to Kirkland next week, aka the Land Where Everyone Appears to be from Microsoft. My office has a big window, and outside the window there's a printer with a red bull on it that says "Bull". It's a popular printer, and people come by all the time and peer at us while they rifle through their print jobs. We're a regular Noogler Zoo, me and my officemate. We have another officemate, a ghost, who evidently never arrived. His big yellow welcome balloons are mostly deflated, their smiles wrinkled into expressions of concern or balloony dismay. We hope he's OK, wherever he is.

Anothr - Read Feeds in Google Talk

Anothr is an instant messaging robot that sends alerts with the latest from your favorites blogs and news sites. It works with Google Talk and Skype, and the only thing you have to do is to add the bot as a contact (for Google Talk and other Jabber clients, the email address is anothr@gmail.com). Then you'll see a list of available commands, but the most important thing is how to add the feeds: you can either type the address of each site individually or type "opml" and then upload your OPML (most feed readers offer the option to export your subscriptions as an OPML file; if they don't, there must be some hacks to make this possible).

The default interval for receiving updates is 10 minutes, but you can change it by typing "timer [number of minutes]".

Gmail Paper - Print Your Messages for Free

Google realized that paper is the best medium to read email, so they'll roll out a new feature called Gmail Paper that lets you archive an email to paper with one click. You'll get the paper messages in 2-4 business days and, best of all, the service is free.

"The cost of postage is offset with the help of relevant, targeted, unobtrusive advertisements, which will appear on the back of your Gmail Paper prints in red, bold, 36 pt Helvetica. No pop-ups, no flashy animations—these are physically impossible in the paper medium."

Google also considered the environment issues and the "Gmail Paper is made out of 96% post-consumer organic soybean sputum, and thus, actually helps the environment".

Related:
Gmail to Fax (unlike Gmail Paper, this one is real)

Google TiSP Offers Free WiFi

"The Internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material."
- Ted Stevens, US Senator (more about the quote)

Today Google fulfills Mr. Stevens' expectations and releases Google TiSP, "a free in-home wireless broadband service that delivers online connectivity via users' plumbing systems. The Toilet Internet Service Provider (TiSP) project is a self-installed, ad-supported online service that will be offered entirely free to any consumer with a WiFi-capable PC and a toilet connected to a local municipal sewage system."



If you sign up for the package, you'll get a kit that includes "a spindle of fiber-optic cable, a TiSP wireless router, installation CD and setup guide. Home installation is a simple matter of GFlushing the fiber-optic cable down to the nearest TiSP Access Node, then plugging the other end into the network port of your Google-provided TiSP wireless router."

The price you'll have to pay is installing a special version of Google Toolbar that analyzes your outpoot. "To offset the cost of providing the TiSP service, we use information gathered by discreet DNA sequencing of your personal bodily output to display online ads that are contextually relevant to your culinary preferences, current health status and likelihood of developing particular medical conditions going forward."

Google provides all the details of the installation, but it also offers professional help: "an army of factory-trained, sub-contracted nanobots from the TiSP Access Node. The nanobots travel with exhilarating nano-speed through the sewer system and into your home to perform the installation service, which should be complete within 15 minutes."

Unfortunately, it's only available in the US and Canada, but it's a clever way to bring free WiFi to every home in the world. After all, the infrastructure is already there.

March 2007 Recap: Upgrades, updates, redesigns

Google Personalized Homepage added comments, ratings and recommendations for gadgets, but also themes.

Picasa Web Albums has community search, an API and upgraded the free accounts to 1GB.

Google Notebook has a new design and is no longer in beta.

Google Talk Gadget can be added to any site, including Google's Personalized Homepage.

There's a new version of Google Desktop that adds instant preview, malware warnings and an updated sidebar.

Google Pack includes an upgraded screensaver that shows photos from the web.

There's a new version of Google Mobile Search and Google tests a new search engine.

Read more:
All the posts from March

Google Writer

Google launched in October 2005 a feed reader, which became popular a year later. The company also offered publishing tools like Blogger, Page Creator and Google Docs, but even if they make your job easier by letting you focus on the content, you still have to come up with the text and the ideas.

Google Writer is a new application planned to be launched soon at Google Labs. It will integrate with many other Google services and guide you while writing a blog post, an essay or a news article.

Let's say you have a blog about Google, you wake up in the morning and wonder what to write. Now you can go to Google Writer, create a new project, enter some keywords and a small description and choose the default output (Blogger). Now when you create a new article inside this project, Google Writer gives you suggestions about the hot topics of the day, insightful articles about Google, news and popular queries that include "Google".

After choosing the topic, Google Writer suggests a title, some key quotes from other blogs and some interesting sites, images, and videos about the topic to facilitate your research. You can choose those that interests you and let Google Writer create some context around the quotes. Google Writer has a big database of n-grams from web pages and it's able to create grammatically-correct sentences. It also learns your writing style from the previous articles, it knows your favorite authors, sites and your interests.

Now that you have the basis of the article, Google Writer suggests some concepts or portions of the text you should write about or expand. Google Writer has a smart autocomplete that learns from the web and is adapted to your style. It's also able to summarize text, to show interesting content from the web related to a text fragment and previous articles on the same topic.

At launch, the tool will only support Internet Explorer and Firefox, and will be invitation-only. Google intends to expand the tool for other online activities like sending mail, instant messaging, so you can dedicate more time to other important things, like writing cool applications. I asked Google if the creativity will disappear with tools like this that build a text on top of some aggregated fragments, but I only got a strange mail:

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

powered by Google Writer"

The Viral Marketing of an April Fools Launch

Probably the best press release written by Google was on April 1st 2004, when Google launched Gmail.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - April 1, 2004 UTC - Amidst rampant media speculation, Google Inc. today announced it is testing a preview release of Gmail – a free search-based webmail service with a storage capacity of up to eight billion bits of information, the equivalent of 500,000 pages of email. Per user.

The inspiration for Gmail came from a Google user complaining about the poor quality of existing email services, recalled Larry Page, Google co-founder and president, Products. "She kvetched about spending all her time filing messages or trying to find them," Page said. "And when she's not doing that, she has to delete email like crazy to stay under the obligatory four megabyte limit. So she asked, 'Can't you people fix this?'"

Launching a product on April 1st had its risks (most people thought it was a hoax) and its advantages (the hoax turned out to be a real mail service, so real that some wanted to pay to get a Gmail address), but it was an excellent viral marketing. From CNN Money:

Google's one gigabyte of storage claim led to some speculation about the Gmail announcement being a hoax since it took place on April Fool's Day. Google has pulled April Fool's jokes on the tech community before, including jokes about pigeons being the driving force behind Google's search technology and that Google was looking to start a new research center on the moon.

In addition, the press release about Gmail was fairly goofy(...). But Jonathan Rosenberg, vice president of the products group at Google, said the Gmail announcement was legitimate. He did concede that the company did get caught up in the spirit of April Fool's Day in its press release.

Google made fun of its search technology, the contextual ad system, their work environment and products. What do you think they'll do this year?

Google as a Symbol of Excellence

When you want to say that a company is a leader in a field or has the best products, you say it's the Google of that field. If you search for "* is the Google of *", you'll find a lot of services and companies compared to Google.

* Krugle is the Google of programming code
* Baidu is the Google of China
* YouTube is the Google of Video
* Michael Arrington is the Google of Web 2.0 (?!)
* Gamespot is the Google of Videogames
* Nero is the Google of burning software
* Winamp is the Google of MP3 players
* Technorati is the Google of blog searching
* Flickr is the Google of photo sharing
* Bloglines is the Google of RSS readers
* Amazon is the Google of online book retailers
* ImageShack is the Google of free image hosting
* TailRank is the Google of memetrackers
* Skype is already the Google of VoIP
* Pandora is the Google of music
* Honda is the Google of automakers
* imdb is the Google of movies
* MySpace is the Google of social networks
* iTunes is the Google of the podcasting world
* Lonely Planet is the Google of guidebooks

{ Idea from a post written by Chris DiBona. }

Patent for Behavioral Targeted Ads in Games

After acquiring AdScape, a company that produces ads for video games, Google has a new patent that reveals some interesting ways of targeting ads to gamers.

Some context:

"In-game advertising is becoming extremely popular. This trend is expected to continue since the 18 to 34 year old male demographic in the U.S. is watching less TV and spending more time playing video games than ever before. The video game industry is becoming a media force on par with the television and motion picture industries. Consequently, ad agencies and game producers are collaborating to introduce more ads into video games. Presently, in-game ads are used to advertise real products and services in a manner analogous to product placement in movies and television shows. For example, a decal on a virtual race car may advertise a product or service. (...) Unfortunately, ads placed in various video games are typically determined while the game is developed and are therefore relatively static. Further, the ads are typically targeted to a broad demographic group. Consequently, in-game ads are often not as relevant and useful as they could be. "

The patent suggests a system that takes into account user's interaction with the game, its decisions and preferences.

The game play tracking operations may track game player input information. For instance, in most simulation games as in a Formula One racing game, a user may select a real world make/team of a car (e.g., Ferrari, Williams-BMW, McLaren-Mercedes, Renault, etc.), a particular driver (e.g., Michael Schumacher, Fernando Alonso, Rubens Barrichello, etc.) as well as the racing track desired to compete in (e.g., Monte Carlo/Monaco, Nurburgring/Europe, Indianapolis/USA, etc.), car color, type of tires, etc. (...) If a user selected a racing car from Dodge, the system may show a Dodge ad or something related.

Game state-based information may include information about the user's game-play. For example it may include, how fast the players are going through the levels, how familiar the players are with the game, what level are the players in (...), how long have the players been playing the game, how frequently the user plays various games, play-pause habits, game information stored to non-volatile memory, etc. (...) If the user has been playing for over two hours continuously, the system may display ads for pizza-hut, coke, coffee and other related goods.

The play characteristics of users, particularly in online RPG games (e.g., time spent chatting with other virtual players versus fighting, time spent bartering versus stealing, time spent exploring versus building, time spent trying new items versus completing levels, decisions made by players leading to certain situations (good versus bad, strategic versus short term), avoiding conflict (risk averse) versus being aggressive, cooperating and collaborating versus doing things alone, friendly versus hostile, etc.) may be particularly useful. User input information may be useful to help infer information about a user. Some other examples user information that may be inferred includes familiarity with a game(s), time spent playing a game(s), how fast is the user advancing and/or skill level, etc. Inferences drawn from such user input information may be made using known classification means such as neural networks, Bayesian networks, support vector machines, etc. Such inferred user information may be useful to help target ads. For instance, users that spend a long time bartering instead of stealing in a game may suggests that they are interested in the best deals rather than the flashiest items so the system may show ads reflecting value.

Basically, you're living in a virtual world where your behavior is tracked and used to deliver ads that fill some predetermined spots. Behavioral targeted advertising is already used on the web by some ad networks, but the information that is tracked is much more limited (the sites you visit, the length of visit). In games, you have access to subtle details (game's choices could become a personality test). I wonder if gamers would accept such a system.

{via SEO by the Sea.}

Google Maps Shows Funny Directions

It's not the first time when Google Maps shows strange directions. This time, if you want to go from Stanford to Stockholm, Google recommends to "swim across the Atlantic Ocean" (only 3,462 miles).


Last month, Google Maps transformed a short walk into a journey of 18 minutes. "For most people, the journey from the Shelbourne Hotel at 200 Sussex Street to Google's Sydney headquarters across the road at 201 Sussex Street would be a 30-step, 30-second trip. But according to Google's new mapping service, the recommended route would see you take a 10.4-kilometre scenic detour that involves crossing the Harbour Bridge twice," reported Sydney Morning Herald in February.



In January, Digg uncovered that you had to make a lot of U-turns to get from Bensalem to North Brunswick. It turned out that Google's driving direction engine had a bug that created an infinite loop.



So next time take Google Maps' drive directions with a grain of salt.

{ via Blogoscoped }