Tag Archives: google

Thoughts

Google Translation is fantastic!

The Google Research blog has a great post about their latest development: Arabic translation. From what I understand, it’s hard to translate back and forth between English and Arabic because of the different sentence structures, but they’ve done it!

Google TranslationThanks to Google Translation and the power of the Internet, now you can read my site in eight languages other than English: French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean and Simplified Chinese. Arabic is coming soon.

Let me know how it reads in your language! 🙂 Just look for the Translate section in the site’s sidebar footer.

Updated 9/28/07: Arabic was added several months ago.

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Thoughts

Google's live tests

Just stumbled onto another entry on the Google Blog which helps explain why I’ve been seeing reports on other blogs of different interfaces for Google’s Search or other products. Apparently they choose to use (at random) sets of live users, and open the additional functionality to them for a limited time, to see how they’d interact with it. The reason is simple: there’s no substitute for real-world testing. This is pretty cool. See the entry here.

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Reviews

Google Pages, re-launched

Justin Rosenstein, Product Manager and Google Page Creator, posted an entry to the Google Blog a few days ago where he detailed the reason for the application. If my memory serves me right, Google Pages launched a few months ago, but access to it was withdrawn or limited in some way. Perhaps the Google folks thought it needed some more work. Anyway, Justin has just re-launched it, so I assume it’s now ready for public consumption.

Just tried it out, and it does seem to be a really easy way to create web pages, much like the .Mac service – except this is free, and there don’t appear to be any bandwidth limitations, at least none I can find. Then again, there isn’t the tight integration here that one finds on the .Mac service, such as with GarageBand or iPhoto, to allow for one-click publishing of podcasts or photos. Still, it’s a pretty cool service.

Here’s the link to the Google Blog entry, and here’s a link to Google Pages.

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How To

A poster of Google search commands

From the Search Engine Watch Blog: “Can’t remember special commands that help in doing special searches at Google (and often work elsewhere, as well). The latest edition of Google’s newsletter for librarians points to two posters you can print with the commands. Suitable for framing — well, for tacking to a wall, you might find them handy. Need something more comprehensive? There’s also the long-standing Google Cheat Sheet…” Here is the link.

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Reviews

Google Calendar is live!

Google Calendar has officially launched, and TechCrunch has a nice review. Just used it myself, it really is fast, like Gmail. Nice sharing features, ability to have private/public calendar, good stuff! See link for details.

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