Gmail Labs is a testing ground for experimental features that aren’t quite ready for primetime. They may change,break or disappear at any time. If (when) a Labs feature breaks, and you’re having trouble loading your inbox, there’s an escape hatch. Use http://mail.google.com/mail/?labs=0.

Custom Date Formats

Adds options to the general settings page allowing the date and time format to be changed independent of language. For example, you can use a 24-hour clock (14:57) or show dates with the day first (31/12/07).

Inserting Images

Allows you to insert images into a message body. You can upload and insert image files in your computer, or insert images by URLs. This lab will not work if you have offline enabled.

Mark As Read Button

Tired of spending all that effort to click on the more actions menu every time you want to mark messages as read without reading them? Now just enable this lab and that is just a button click away!

Pictures In Chat

See your friends’ profile pictures when you chat with them.

Quote Selected Text

Quote the text you have selected when you reply to a message. (Now works with the mouse, too!)

Send & Archive

Adds a button to the compose form that lets you send a reply message and archive the email conversation in a single action.

Sender Time Zone

Should I reply to this mail or just call the guy? Ooops… it’s 1 am. Sorry, I didn’t mean to disturb…

Signature Tweaks

Places your signature before the quoted text in a reply, and removes the "–" line that appears before signatures.

Superstars

Adds additional star icons. After enabling this feature:
(1) Go to the "General" Settings page to choose which superstars you wish to use.
(2) Use either the keyboard shortcut (‘s’) or click to rotate through your selected superstars.
(3) Use the search operator "has:" to find all messages with your superstar (e.g. "has:red-bang", "has:blue-star"). Learn the name of a superstar by hovering over its image in the "General" Settings page.

Undo Send

Oops, hit "Send" too soon? Stop messages from being sent for a few seconds after hitting the send button.

So how many Google products and services do you use? I’ve checked Alexa Traffic Ranking for Google.com and found that the top 3 Google Products remain Google Search Engine, Google Mail (Gmail), and Google Image Search or else 90% of Googlers uses Google only as a Search Engine and of course as a free email service provider. If you are not tech savvy then chances are that you are unaware about most of the following Google products, services, and tools.

Now I’m going to list all the Google Products and Services which I’m using. If you haven’t tried any of them then I really suggest you to check it out and see if it can make your life easier, better and more productive. To see a snapshot of what all Google products are you using then go to Google My Account which lists the top Google Services which you have signed up for.

1. Google Search & it’s features - Google search is the most popular search engine on the Web.
2. Blogger - A free blog publishing tool for easily sharing your thoughts with the world.
3. FeedBurner – Allows bloggers and podcasters to manage their RSS feeds.
4. Google Ad Planner – A free media planning tool that can help you identify websites your audience is likely to visit so you can make better-informed advertising decisions.
5. Google AdSense – Place contextual Google ads on your site – and earn money.
6. Google AdWords - Advertise online and pay only when people click on your ad.
7. Google Affiliate Network (DoubleClick) - Full-service online marketing company specializing in pay-for-performance media.
8. Google Alerts - Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.
9. Google Analytics (Urchin) - Google Analytics makes it easy to improve your results online.
10. Google Apps - Software-as-a-service for business email, information sharing and security.
11. Google Base - Google Base is a place where you can easily submit all types of online and offline content.
12. Google Blog Search - Blog Search is Google search technology focused on blogs.
13. Google Bookmarks - Google Bookmarks is an online service that lets you save your favorite sites and attach labels and comments.
14. Google Book Search – Search and preview millions of books from libraries and publishers worldwide.
15. Google Calendar - Keep track of all your life’s important events – birthdays, reunions, little league games, doctor’s appointments – all in one place.
16. Google Checkout - Buy from stores across the web and track all your orders and shipping in one place.
17. Google Chrome - A browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier.
18. Google Code - Code is for external developers interested in Google related development.
19. Google Contacts – Similar to an online address book, the Contact Manager gives you easy access to the people you want to reach.
20. Google Custom Search Engine & Google Subscribed Links – With Google Custom Search Engine and Subscribed Links, you can create a search engine tailored to your needs and lets you create custom search results that users can add to their Google search pages.
21. Google Desktop - Search your computer as easily as you search the web with Google.
22. Google Dictionary - Free online dictionary.
23. Google Directory - The web organized by topic into categories.
24. Google Documents – Free web-based word processor and spreadsheet, which allow you share and collaborate online.
25. Google Earth & Google Mars - Offers maps and satellite images for complex or pinpointed regional searches.
26. Google Finance - Offers a broad range of information about stocks, mutual funds, and companies.
27. Google Friend Connect – Instantly awakens and strengthens the community that visits your site by enriching it with social features.
28. Google Gears - A Firefox and Internet Explorer extension that allows to navigate on compatible websites offline and synchronize when going back online.
29. Google Groups - Where groups of people have discussions about common interests.
30. Google Health - Puts you in charge of your health information.
31. Google Image Search & Similar Images - The most comprehensive image search on the web. Google Search Images allows you to search for images using pictures rather than words.
32. Google In Quotes – Allows you to find quotes from stories linked to from Google News.
33. Google Knol - Knol makes it free and easy to create, collaborate on, and publish credible web content.
34. Google Latitude - See where your friends are on a map.
35. Google Local Business Center - If you are a business owner Claim your business listing today and let customers find you online!
36. Google Mail (Gmail) - Gmail is a new kind of webmail, built on the idea that email can be more intuitive, efficient, and useful.
37. Google Maps & Google Map Maker - Find local businesses, view maps and get driving directions. With Map Maker you can edit the map in more than a hundred countries and watch your edits go into Google Maps.
38. Google Mobile - Upgrade your phone with free Google products.
39. Google Moderator - A tool that allows distributed communities to submit and vote on questions for talks, presentations and events.
40. Google News, News Archive Search & Google News Timeline - Aggregated headlines and a search engine of many of the world’s news sources. News archive search provides an easy way to search and explore historical archives. News Timeline is a web application that organizes information chronologically.
41. Google Notebook (SearchWiki) - With Google Notebook, you can browse, clip, and organize information from across the web in a single online location that’s accessible from any computer.
42. Google Patents - Search the full text of the U.S. patent corpus and find patents that interest you.
43. Google Product Search (Froogle) - Presents photographs of products and links to the stores that sell them online.
44. Google Reader - Web based feed reader to keep up with blogs and news.
45. Google Scholar - Provides a search of scholarly literature across many disciplines and sources, including theses, books, abstracts and articles.
46. Google Sets - Automatically create sets of items from a few examples.
47. Google Sites - Google Sites is a free and easy way to create and share web pages.
48. Google SketchUp - Create, modify and share 3D models.
49. Google Sky - Google Sky includes a number of different ways to explore the universe.
50. Google Squared – Takes a category and creates a starter ‘square‘ of information, automatically fetching and organizing facts from across the web.
51. Google Store – Official Google Accessories, Apparel Items, Software, Office Equipment
52. Google Suggest - As you type your search, Google offers keyword suggestions in real time.
53. Google Talk - Chat with family and friends over the Internet for free.
54. Google Toolbar - Internet Explorer and Firefox Toolbar with Google search.
55. Google Translate – Free online language translation service instantly translates text and web pages.
56. Google Trends & Google Insights for Search - Compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Use Google Insights for Search and see for yourself what the world is searching for.
57. Google Video - Search and watch millions of videos indexed from all over the web.
58. Google Wave – Google Wave is a new online communication and collaboration tool.
59. Google Web Accelerator - Google Web Accelerator works with your browser to help web pages show up in a snap.
60. Google Web History - Your web history is stored on Google servers, which means that you can view and manage it from any computer.
61. Google Webmaster Tools - Provides you with detailed reports about your pages’ visibility on Google.
62. iGoogle - Your personalized Google home page.
63. Jaiku - Create your own microblog and connect with your friends.
64. Orkut - Social networking site designed to make your social life more active and stimulating.
65. Picasa - Helps you organize, edit, and share your photos.
66. YouTube - Share your videos with friends, family, and the world.

I haven’t included Google WiFi as I’m not from United States. Google WiFi is a free wireless Internet service to the city of Mountain View, California. I know that the list doesn’t end here but I included only the products which I’ve used or have been using. Please let me know if you know any other interesting service from Google so that I can give a try. So, how many Google Products and Services are you using?

10. Your kids still believe the Googlebot is bringing the Christmas presents.

9. Your reply to “How are you” is “I’m feeling lucky”, combined with a clicking gesture.

8. You shout at the librarian when she takes more than 0.1 seconds to find your book.

7. You just lost a case in court to name your newborn son “Google”.

6. You think of Google as your second-best friend, but lately consider it to get into first position.

5. Your Google shirt is losing color.

4. When people talk to you, you try to optimize their keywords.

3. Your last three Sunday family trips have been to the Googleplex.

2. You are convinced “What’s your PageRank?” is a good pick-up line.

And the number one sign you are addicted to Google:

1. You are completely clueless without a computer.

Source: E-Marketing Blog

Thank you for signing up to give us early feedback on Google Wave. We’re happy to give you access to Google Wave and are enlisting your help to improve the product.

Today, everyone, on twitter is waiting for an email from Google with the subject "Your invitation to preview Google Wave". I was excited about the product during those launch days. But, was least interested today. Since, I was too busy to sign up. But, at last I did it. The first impression of Google Wave was "Google Wave – Please install Google Chrome Frame!" I noticed the Google Wave invite after 3 hours only and when I checked Twitter ‘Google Wave wasn’t a trending topic either. But it became one eventually so Google has started inviting more people for the Google Wave preview version.

But Surprise, Surprise! They Have Enabled "8 Invites" As Well

The first impression wasn’t the best impression since I use IE8. Google Wave works perfect on Google Chrome. And a Microsoft guy told me that "Microsoft Officially Don’t Support The Use Of Google Chrome Frameworl Due To Security Issues." I installed the Internet Explorer Google Chrome Framework for Internet Explorer 8 (Wonder why I use IE? It’s ‘coz I’m a Microsoft fanatic and perhaps that’s the reason why I see perfection only on Internet Explorer).

I’ll be doing an exclusive review of Google Wave Preview Edition soon. It will be about how to use Google Wave the way it’s meant to be used. So, please don’t forget to comeback or to leave a comment below. Let me do a wave today! If you’re not Waving yet then request your invite here.

Here are few tips from the AdSense team to help protect your Google AdSense account from invalid clicks:

• We understand that it’s not always possible to control the behavior of your users, but you can be proactive about monitoring your traffic, and you can take steps to ensure that your site provides a helpful and safe environment for users and advertisers. Here are some top tips for keeping your account in good standing (which you may have seen before): https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=23921
• Expanding on the tip “Be aware of how your site is promoted.”, we’d like to remind you that, should you purchase traffic to promote your site, you do so at your own risk. There are many site promotion services out there that appear to be legitimate PPC advertising companies or search engines, but actually may be sending artificial traffic to your site for their own gain. (For legal reasons, we’re not allowed to disclose the names of such services.)To combat this, we highly recommend that you use channels to segment your traffic by source (e.g. a channel for your site’s Google AdWords traffic only). If one channel’s reports look particularly suspicious, you may want to consider unsubscribing from that traffic service. We also recommend using Analytics to slice and dice your traffic reports further to ensure that you’re receiving clicks from users who are genuinely interested in your ads. 
• Though we encourage you to be proactive about monitoring your site and ad traffic, we highly discourage the use of click tracking via third-party software or custom ad implementations. These methods may:
  • inadvertently disclose sensitive information about you or your site to a third-party
  • disrupt Google’s ad delivery or click logging in a way that violates our Terms and Conditions

In addition, click tracking may not provide you with significantly more information than you can already find in your AdSense or Analytics reports. We believe that the creative use of channels can help you gain detailed insights into your account.

• If you see unusual activity on your account, feel free to submit this form to let us know: https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/request.py?contact=invalid_clicks_contact Please note that we will only respond if we find a significant issue with your account.
• Invalid clicks can come from many sources, as described at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=16737. While we’re unable to go into the details of our monitoring system, you should know that invalid clicks don’t always mean clicking on your own ads or using click bots. Our Ad Traffic Quality Team looks for numerous types of activity that may inflate advertiser costs, then takes the necessary actions to protect our advertisers.
• That said, we still find that many publishers are clicking on their own ads, possibly because they feel that Google is disregarding those clicks. Keep in mind that even though we filter the revenue from an invalid click, we don’t ignore it completely. If we detect significant invalid activity on your AdSense ads, we may take action on your account to protect our advertisers from inflated costs. Here are some examples of situations in which clicking your own ads is prohibited:
  • Clicking out of interest in the ad content
  • Clicking to see an ad’s destination URL, such as for filtering purposes (we recommend trying the AdSense Preview Tool, available at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=10005)
  • Clicking to ensure that Google is properly registering clicks on your ads (we log all ad clicks, but it can sometimes take up to 24 hours before your reports are finalized)
  • Clicking to test your website
• For general invalid click questions, you can find more information at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=8426
• For questions about AdSense accounts disabled for invalid clicks, you can find more information at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=57153

How to make a girl fall in love with you, all your answers here!

How to make a girl fall in love with you is one of the most important questions you can answer. And which girl am I talking about? Well, Google of course. Some simple tips as to how to make a girl fall in love with your blog, the Google girl .

Some Simple SEO Tips

What Kind of Girl Are You After?

Decide who your audience are, what they will want to read about, what key terms they will search to find that reading material and then optimise your blog for those terms and blog about it.

Chose a Cool Name or Use Your Own Name

Ideally buy a URL with the keyword in it that you want the blog to rank for, or your name. Google looks at the works that link to your blog, and you rank for those works. People inevitably link to your blog by its domain name, and if that is one of the words that you want to rank for, then you will rank for that more easily. Google also places a lot of emphasis on domain names. If you are building a personal brand then buy a domain name with your name in it.

Title Your Blog

In the HTML code of your blog there is what is called a title tag. This is the Title tag on Murray Newlands.com “Affiliate Marketing Blog & Social Media Marketing Blog”. This should be the key term that you want your blog to rank for. I want my blog to rank for affiliate marketing blog, affiliate marketing affiliate blog, social media marketing and social media marketing blog. My choice of Title tag helps my site to rank for those terms.

Blog Posts: a love letter to her

1. Blog about what you want to be found for!
2. Think of title for your posts and then use Google external tool to see how much traffic is available on the terms you are looking for.
3. Do a search on Google for title:”key term from Google external” to see what the competition on that term is. If you are optimising a post for a key term you will put the term in the title: therefore the more people with the key term in the title the more competitive it is. and the harder it is to rank for that term.
4. Use the key term in the first paragraph of the post.
5. Use the key term several times in the post.
6. Use the key term at the end of the post.

Link Love for to get the Girls to like you.

1. Google makes sites rank for the words that people use as terms to link to that site from. Link to my site using the words “Affiliate blog” and I will start to rank for that term. Link to me for the term Obama and I will start to rank for the word Obama.
2. Link to other blogs from your posts and they are more likely to do the same back.
3. If you are going to link to my blog please write about me as said Murraynewlands.com Affiliate blog and link on the term affiliate blog, or celebrity blogger, or affiliate marketing. Why? Because I am currently trying to rank for those terms. Not sure how I want you to link to me? A – ask me, B- look at the key terms in my title bar.
4. Know what terms you want to rank for and ask people to link to you from those words.
5. If you want to rank for a term that is not in your title description do a blog post about that term and then ask people to link to your site using that word to that post.

   I.E., please link to me using the words “Celebrity blogger” to the post to this post http://www.murraynewlands.com/index.php/2009/07/celebrity-blogger-celebrity-blogger-murray-newlands/

   Link to this post on the term “how to make a girl fall in love with you”

Get a Wingman

1. Teach this to your friends, all of them.
2. They will rank better.
3. They will get better links.
4. They will get more traffic.
5. When they link to you it will help your site more.

Create a Speed Dating Event and Make It a Love In

The more sites you link with and teach better seo and the more they link to you the better your seo will be and the more your blog will grow.

For this post I chose a fun title “how to make a girl fall in love with you”. It is off topic for my blog but “how to make a girl fall in love with you” is a search phrase with lots of traffic and comparatively few intitle competitors.

Source: Was a guest post by Affiliate Blog on JohnChow

Recently, one of my friend asked me “Hey Niks, do you know Gmail Labs”? I replied – “I know Google Suggest Labs”. He smiled and said it’s alright, Gmail Labs is something different! Well, this enticed me to know what Gmail Lab is and how can it help. Although, all these years Google has been making my experience with Gmail more pleasing, effective and productive, so what’s with Gmail Labs? Actually, Gmail Labs is full of experimental new features that you could choose to use or not use. However, many people might still don’t know about Gmail Labs or haven’t taken time to review all the exciting features. With that in mind, I thought sharing Top 10 excellent features worth turning on that can increase your daily productivity.

Offline – I found this to be the best feature among all. This allows you to work offline and work with your messages without even having Internet connection. What this means is that you could be using Gmail, lose your Internet connection, and never know the difference. Your inbox messages, attachments, etc. are always synced with your desktop, and you are free to use offline.

Email Addict – Too much on Gmail? Enable this features and a link would appear at the top of the page, blocking your Inbox and chat screen for 15 minutes and allowing you to take a break. Email Addict is superb for people who have trouble stepping away from their computer!

Undo Send – This is very helpful for me, I often find myself saying –Oops, Send so soon?? So, this gives me a grace period of five second to correct my error. You will see a new “Undo” link with every sent mail, just click “Undo” and it will take you right back to compose message where changes can be done.  

Message Translation – Got online friends who happen to speak other language? This new feature in Gmail Labs automatically translates your inbox messages to the language you can understand. You can simply click on the translate link, which automatically appears when an email in different language than your default one. Now language would not be an obstacle for users!

Multiple Inboxes – Multiple Inboxes allows me to implement multiple input boxes. So, now it is possible for me to systematize and underscore the new inbox messages displayed under one setting. I now have better customized view of my mails and it is easy to handle them at a glance as well. However, you should know that this feature creates multiple inboxes for labels, and not for your secondary Gmail accounts.

Mouse Gestures – This is extremely useful for person like me who relies more upon mouse than hitting keyboard shortcuts. I can now navigate my mails using Mouse Gestures. Hold right-click and move the mouse left to visit to a last conversation, move it right to visit to the next conversation, and move up to visit back to the inbox view. So simple!

Canned Response – Canned response is a no newer but has two interesting features that can help you save time. It has the ability to store email as templates and then skill to automatically reply to emails using those templates. So guys don’t waste time typing similar response when you can type it once and save it!

Inserting Images – I always use to get irritated whenever I had to attach images in the email coz of the process. And now the newest Gmail Labs is making my work lot easier when I have to send an image!

Task – Managing my task was never this easier with Gmail! But now, I can create my due dates, to-do list, sub-tasks and loads of things using incredibly simple interface in Gmail window!

Hide Unread Counts – This features is great for people that are lazy to manage their inbox and don’t care about unread mails! It hides the unread counts of Inbox, label etc!

Beyond doubt Gmail has become more productive, easier to use and truly viable alternative to Outlook! Check out Gmail Labs for even more interesting features that might make you even more productive.

I have been using Google Adwords Vs Yahoo Search Marketing for quite some time now. Of course there is lot of different stuff with both the giant but I came across two major different between Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing that could turn into a big discussion!

1. Quality Score:

Google’s Quality Score is on an individual keyword that you choose and is obtained at time when search takes place. You can also have low and high QS keywords in same ad group. With Google the broad match and phrase match keywords show you only average Quality Scores. Only the perfect match can show you even the close real QS, yet it is average since QS is based on things that occur during search.

Yahoo’s Quality Score are only to appear at the ad group level. This simply means that everything in the ad group is a backup for QS. Any bad QS keyword could easily drag down the others. Yahoo suggests that they organize ad group just like Google but then split up the ad groups by the number of traffic. This means with Yahoo I get 3 times as many ad groups than I get Google!

2. Match Type.

Google Phrase – Broad, Negative Phrase, Exact, Negative Broad, Negative Exact. Broad is a wild card for Google that would locate all keywords with any of the keywords in your phrase plus synonyms, singulars, plurals and anything before and after the term. Exact is just the exact nothing more or nothing less and Negatives also work the same way. If you wish to put in a singular then you have to put in singular as well. In case you go for negative match you will not have exact match for the same term. Google believes that a plural and singular keywords to be two separate words. Negatives could be done at the ad group and Campaign level!

Yahoo Phrase – Advanced, Standard, Excluded Words. Here Yahoo does not have any exact match. Advanced is simply like Google Broad and even standard is just like Google broad. But with Yahoo if you put in negative keyword match it would not be excluded if you have it as advanced or standard match. In case you put singular it would exclude the plural. Not like Google, Yahoo singular and plural keywords to be the same keywords and cannot be separated. Negatives could be done at the account level and ad group level only!

Of course there are many other differences like geo targeting, campaign settings and more, but these 2 I found it not very obvious in my understanding. However, if you are a newbie then I would say go try out Yahoo first because it is comparatively easier to get your ads placed then Adwords. Google AdWords is capable of delivering a lot of traffic, but their “quality score” formula makes it difficult for some people to get their ads shown on Google. Ensure you have a good stats program so you would know what the traffic does once it enters your site.

Introduction

Since 2004, when Google began to have annual reports, Larry and I have taken turns writing an annual letter. I never imagined I would be writing one in the midst of an economic crisis unlike any we have seen in decades. As I write this, search queries are reflecting economic hardship, the major market indexes are one half of what they were less than 18 months ago, and unemployment is at record levels.

Nonetheless, I am optimistic about the future, because I believe scarcity breeds clarity: it focuses minds, forcing people to think creatively and rise to the challenge. While much smaller in scale than today’s global collapse, the dot-com bust of 2000-2002 pushed Google and others in the industry to take some tough decisions – and we all emerged stronger as a result.

This new crisis punctuates the end of our first decade as a company, a decade that has brought great change to Google, the web and the Internet as a whole. As I reflect on this short time period, our accomplishments and our shortcomings, I am very excited about what the next ten years may bring.

But let me start a little farther back – in 1990, the very first web page was created at http://info.cern.ch/. By late 1992, there were only 26 websites in the world so there was not much need for a search engine. When NCSA Mosaic (the first widely used web browser) came out in 1993, every new website that was created would get posted to its "What’s New" page at a rate of about one a day: http://www.dejavu.org/prep_whatsnew.htm. Just five years later, in 1998, web pages numbered in the tens of millions, and search became crucial. At this point, Google was a small research project at Stanford; later that year it became a tiny startup. The search index sat on a small number of disk drives enclosed within Lego-like blocks. Perhaps a few thousand people, mostly academics, used the service.

Fast-forward to today, the changes in scale are striking. The web itself has grown by about a factor of 10,000, as has our search index. The number of people who use Google’s services every day is now in the hundreds of millions. More importantly, billions of people now have access to the Internet via computers and mobile phones. Like many other web companies, the vast majority of our services are available worldwide and free to users because they are supported by ads. So a child in an Internet cafe in a developing nation can use the same online tools as the wealthiest person in the world. I am proud of the small role Google has played in the democratization of information, but there is much more left to do.

Search

Search remains at the very core of what we do at Google, just as it has been from our earliest days. As the scale has changed dramatically over the years, the presentation and quality of our search results have also undergone many changes since 1998. In the past year alone we have made 359 changes to our web search – nearly one per day. Some are not easy to spot, such as changes in ranking based on personalization (launched broadly in 2005) but they are important in getting the most relevant search results. Others are very easy to see and improve search efficiency in a very clear way, such as spelling correction, annotations, and suggestions.

While I am proud of what has been accomplished in search over the past decade, there are important areas in which I wish we had made more progress. Perfect search requires human-level artificial intelligence, which many of us believe is still quite distant. However, I think it will soon be possible to have a search engine that "understands" more of the queries and documents than we do today. Others claim to have accomplished this, and Google’s systems have more smarts behind the curtains than may be apparent from the outside, but the field as a whole is still shy of where I would have expected it to be. Part of the reason is the dramatic growth of the web – for any particular query, it is likely there are many documents on the topic using the exact same vocabulary. And as the web grows, so does the breadth and depth of the curiosity of those searching. I expect our search engine to become much "smarter" in the coming decade.

So too will the interfaces by which users look for and receive information. While many things have changed, the basic structure of Google search results today is fairly similar to how it was ten years ago. This is partly because of the benefits of simplicity; in fact, the Google homepage has become increasingly simple over the years: http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2006-04-21-n63.html. But we are starting to see more significant changes in search interfaces. Today you can search from your cell phone by just speaking into it and Google Reader can suggest interesting blogs without any query at all. It is my expectation that in the next decade our searches and results will look very different than they do today.

One of the most striking changes that has happened in the past few years is that search results are no longer just web pages. They include images, videos, books, maps, and more. From the outset, we realized that to have comprehensive search we would have to venture beyond web pages. In 2001, we launched Google Image Search and via Google Groups we made available and searchable the most comprehensive archive of Usenet postings ever assembled (800 million messages dating back to 1981).

Just this past fall we expanded Image Search to include the LIFE Magazine photo archive. This is a collection of 10 million photos, more than 95 percent of which have never been seen before, and includes historical pictures such as the Skylab space station orbiting above Earth and Neil Armstrong landing on the moon. Integrating images into search remains a challenge, primarily because we are so reliant on the surrounding text to gauge a picture’s relevance. In the future, using enhanced computer vision technology, we hope to be able to understand what’s depicted in the image itself.

YouTube

Video is often thought of as an entertainment medium, but it is also a very important source of high-quality information. Some queries seem like natural choices to show video results, such as for sports and travel destinations. Yet videos are also great resources for topics such as computer hardware and software (I bought my last RAID based on a video review), scientific experiments, and education such as courses on quantum mechanics.

Google Video was first launched in 2005 as a search service for television content because TV close-captioning made search possible and user-generated video had yet to take off. But it subsequently evolved to a site where individuals and corporations alike could post their own videos. Today Google Video searches many different video hosting sites, the largest of which is YouTube, which we acquired in 2006.

Every minute, 15 hours worth of video are uploaded to YouTube – the equivalent of 86,000 new full length movies every week. YouTube channels now include world leaders (the President of the United States and prime ministers of Japan, the UK and Australia), royalty (the Queen of England and Queen Rania of Jordan), religious leaders (the Pope), and those seeking free expression (when Venezuelan broadcaster El Observador was shut down by the government, it started broadcasting on YouTube).

When it began, online video was associated with small fuzzy images. Today, many of our uploads are in HD quality (720 rows and greater) and can be streamed to computers, televis
ions, and mobile phones with increasing fidelity (thanks to improvements in video compression). In the future, vast libraries of movie-theater-quality video (4000+ columns) will be available instantly on any device.

Books

Books are one of the greatest sources of information in the world and from the earliest days of Google we hoped to eventually incorporate them into our search corpus. Within a couple of years, Larry was experimenting with digitizing books using a jury-rigged contraption in our office. By 2003, we launched Google Print, now called Google Book Search. Today, we are able to search the full text of almost 10 million books. Moreover, in October we reached a landmark agreement with a broad class of authors and publishers, including the Authors’ Guild and the Association of American Publishers. If approved by the Court, this deal will make millions of in-copyright, out-of-print books available for U.S. readers to search, preview, and buy online – something that has been simply unavailable to date. Many of these books are difficult, if not impossible, to find because they are not sold through bookstores or held on most library shelves; yet they make up the vast majority of books in existence. The agreement also provides other important public benefits, including increased access to users with disabilities, the creation of a non-profit registry to help others license these books, the creation of a corpus to promote basic research, and free access to full texts at a kiosk in every public library in the United States.

Geo

While digitizing all the world’s books is an ambitious project, digitizing the world is even more challenging. Beginning with our acquisition of Keyhole (the basis of Google Earth) in October 2004, it has been our goal to provide high-quality information for geographic needs. By offering both Google Earth and Google Maps, we aim to provide a comprehensive world model encompassing all geographic information including imagery, topography, road, buildings, and annotations. Today we stitch together images from satellites, airplanes, cars, and user uploads, as well as collect important data, such as roads, from numerous different sources including governments, companies, and directly from users. After the launch of Google Map Maker in Pakistan, users mapped 25,000 kilometers of uncharted road in just two months.

Ads

We always believed that we could have an advertising system that would add value not only to our bottom line but also to the quality of our search result pages. Rather than relying on distracting flashy ads, we developed relevant, clearly marked text-based ads above and to the right of our search results. After a number of early experiments, the first self-service system known as AdWords launched in 2000 starting with 350 advertisers. While these ads yielded small amounts of money compared to banner ads at the time, as the dot-com bubble burst, this system became our life preserver. As we syndicated it to EarthLink and then AOL, it became an important source of revenue for other companies as well.

Today, AdWords has grown beyond just being a feature of Google. It is a vast ecosystem that provides valuable traffic and leads to hundreds of thousands of businesses: indeed in many ways it has helped democratize access to advertising, by creating an open marketplace where small business and start-ups can compete with well-established, well-funded companies. AdWords is also an important source of revenue for websites that create the content that we all search. Last year, AdSense (our publisher-facing program) generated more than $5 billion dollars of revenue for our many publishing partners.

Also in the last year we ventured further into other advertising formats with the acquisition of DoubleClick. This may seem at odds with the value we place on relevant text-based ads. However, we have found that richer ad formats have their place such as video ads within YouTube and dynamic ads on game websites. In fact, we also now serve video ads on television with our AdSense for TV product. Our goal is to match advertisers and publishers using the formats and mediums most appropriate to their goals and audience.

Despite the progress in our advertising systems and the growth of our base of advertisers, I believe there are significant improvements still to be made. While our ad system has powerful features, it is also complex, and can confuse many small and local advertisers whose products and services could be very useful to our users. Furthermore, the presentation formats of our advertisements are not the optimal way to peruse through large numbers of products. In the next decade, I hope we can more effectively incorporate commercial offerings from the tens of millions of businesses worldwide and present them to consumers when and where they are most useful.

Apps

Within a couple of years of our founding, a number of colleagues and I were starting to hit the limitations of our traditional email clients. Our mailboxes were too big for them to handle speedily and reliably. It was challenging or impossible to have email available and synchronized when switching between different computers and platforms. Furthermore, email access required VPN (virtual private networks) so everyone was always VPN’ing, thereby creating extra security risks. Searching mail was slow, awkward, and cumbersome.

By the end of 2001 we had a prototype of Gmail that was used internally. Like several existing services at the time, it was web-based. But unlike those services it was designed for power users with high volumes of email. While our initial focus was on internal usage, it soon became clear we had something of value for the whole world. When Gmail was launched externally, in 2004, other top webmail sites offered 2MB and 4MB mailboxes, less than the size of a single attachment I might find in a message today. Gmail offered 1 Gigabyte at launch, included full-text search, and a host of other features not previously found in webmail. Since then Gmail has continued to push the envelope of email systems, including functionality such as instant messaging, video-conferencing, and offline access (launched in Gmail Labs this past January). Today some Googlers have more than 25 gigabytes of email going back nearly 10 years that they can search through in seconds. By the time you read this, you should be able to receive emails written in French and read them in English.

The benefits of web-based services, also known as cloud computing, are clear. There is no installation. All data is stored safely in a data center (no worries if your hard drive crashes). It can be accessed anytime, anywhere there is a working web browser and Internet connection (and sometimes even if there is not one – see below).

Perhaps even more importantly, new forms of communication and collaboration become possible. I am writing this letter using Google Docs. There are several other people helping me edit it simultaneously. Moments ago I stepped away and worked on it on a laptop. Without having to hit save or manage any synchronization all the changes appeared in seconds on the desktop that I am back to using now. In fact, today I have worked on this document using three different operating systems and two different web browsers, all without any special software or complex logistics.

In addition to Gmail and Google Docs, the Google Apps suite of products now includes Spreadsheets, Calendar, Sites, and more. It is also now available to companies, universities, and other organizations. In fact, more than 1 million organizations use Google Apps today, including Genentech, the Washington D.C. city government, the University of Arizona, and Gothenburg University in S
weden.

Because tens of millions of consumers already use our products, it is easy for organizations – from businesses to non-profits – to adopt them. Very little training is required and the passionate Google users already in these organizations are usually excited to help those who need a hand. In many ways, Google Apps are even more powerful in a business or group than they are for individuals because Apps can change the way businesses operate and the speed at which they move. For example, with Google Apps Web Forms we innovated by addressing the key problem of distributed data collection, making it incredibly simple to collect survey data from within the enterprise – a critical feature for collecting internal feedback we use extensively when "dogfooding" all of our products.

There are a number of things we could improve about these web services. For example, since they have arisen from different groups and acquisitions, there is less uniformity across them than there should be. For example, they can have different sharing models and chat capabilities. We are working to shift all of our applications to a common infrastructure. I believe we will achieve this soon, creating greater uniformity and capability across all of them

Chrome

We have found the web-based service model to have significant advantages. But it also comes with its own set of challenges, primarily related to web browsers, which can be slow, unreliable, and unable to function offline. Rather than accept these shortcomings, we have sought to remedy them in a number of ways. We have contributed code and generated revenue for several existing web browsers like Mozilla Firefox, enabling them to invest more in their software. We have also developed extensions such as Google Gears, which allows a browser to function offline.

In the past couple of years, however, we decided that we wanted to make some substantial architectural changes to how web browsers work. For example, we felt that different tabs should be segregated into separate sandboxes so that one poorly functioning website does not take down the whole browser. We also felt that for us to continue to build great web services we needed much faster Javascript performance than current browsers offered.

To address these issues we have created a new browser, called Google Chrome. It has a multiprocess model and a very fast JavaScript engine we call V8. There are many other notable features, so I invite you to try it out for yourself. Chrome is not yet available on Mac and Linux so many of us, myself included, are not able to use it on a regular basis. If all goes well, this should be addressed later this year. Of course, this is just the start, and Chrome will continue to evolve. Furthermore, other web browsers have been spurred on by Chrome in areas such as JavaScript performance, making everyone better off.

Android

We first created mobile search for Google back in 2000 and then we started to create progressively more tailored and complex mobile offerings. Today, the phone I carry in my pocket is more powerful than the desktop computer I used in 1998. It is possible that this year, more Internet-capable smartphones will ship than desktop PCs. In fact, your most "personal" computer, the one that you carry with you in your pocket, is the smartphone. Today, almost a third of all Google searches in Japan are coming from mobile devices – a leading indicator of where the rest of the world will soon be.

However, mobile software development has been challenging. There are different mobile platforms, customized differently to each device and carrier combination. Furthermore, deploying mobile applications can require separate business arrangements with individual carriers and manufacturers. While the rise of app stores from Apple, Nokia, RIM, Microsoft, and others as well as the adoption of HTML 5 on mobile platforms have helped, it is still very difficult to provide a service to the largest group of network-connected people in the world.

We acquired the startup Android in 2005 and set about the ambitious goal of creating a new mobile operating system that would allow open interoperation across carriers and manufacturers. Last year, after a lot of hard work, we released Android to the world. As it is open source, anyone is free to use it and modify it. We look forward to seeing how this open platform will spur greater innovation. Furthermore, Android allows for easy creation of applications which can be deployed on any Android device. To date, more than 1000 apps have been uploaded to the Android Market including Shop Savvy (which reads bar codes and then compares prices), our own Latitude, and Guitar Hero World Tour.

AI

The past decade has seen tremendous changes in computing power amplified by the continued growth of Google’s data centers. It has enabled the growth and processing of increasingly large data sets such as the web, the world’s books, and video. This in turn has allowed problems once considered to be in the fantasy realm of artificial intelligence to come closer to reality.

Google Translate supports automatic machine translation between 1640 language pairs. This is made possible by large computer clusters and vast repositories of monolingual and multilingual texts: http://www.google.com/intl/en/help/faq_translation.html. This technology also allows us to support translated search where the query gets translated to another language and the results get translated back.

While the earliest Google Voice Search ran as a crude demo in 2001, today our own speech recognition technology powers GOOG411, the voice search feature of the Google Mobile App, and Google Voice. It, too, takes advantage of large training sets and significant computing capability. Last year, PicasaWeb, our photo hosting site, released face recognition, bringing a technology that is on the cutting edge of computer science to a consumer web service.

Just a few months ago we released Google Flu Trends, a service that uses our logs data (without revealing personally identifiable information) to predict flu incidence weeks ahead of estimates by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). It is amazing how an existing data set typically used for improving search quality can be brought to bear on a seemingly unrelated issue and can help to save lives. I believe this sort of approach can do even more – going beyond monitoring to inferring potential causes and cures of disease. This is just one example of how large data sets such as search logs coupled with powerful data mining can improve the world while safe guarding privacy.

Conclusion

Given the tremendous pace of technology, it is impossible to predict far into the future. However, I think the past decade tells us some things to expect in the next. Computers will be 100 times faster still and storage will be 100 times cheaper. Many of the problems that we call artificial intelligence today will become accepted as standard computational capabilities, including image processing, speech recognition, and natural language processing. New and amazing computational capabilities will be born that we cannot even imagine today.

While about half the people in the world are online today via computers and mobile phones, the Internet will reach billions more in the coming decade. I expect that by using simple yet powerful models of computing such as web services, everyone will be more productive. These tools enable individuals, small groups, and small businesses to accomplish tasks that only large corporations could achieve before, whether it is mak
ing and releasing a movie, marketing a product, or reporting on a war.

When I was a child, researching anything involved a long trip to the local library and good deal of luck that one of the books there would be about the subject of interest. I could not have imagined that today anyone would be able to research any topic in seconds. The dark clouds currently looming over the world economy are a hardship for us all, but by the time today’s children grow up, this recession will be a footnote in history. Yet the technologies that we create between now and then will define their way of life.

Source: Official Google Blog

So, what does a Google Chrome beta bring? Speed, and lots of it. According to Google, it’s 25% faster on our V8 benchmark and 35% faster on the Sunspider benchmark than the current stable channel version and almost twice as fast when compared to their original beta version.

Some of the new features you can try out include form auto fill, full page zoom and auto scroll (both thanks to a new version of WebKit), and a cool new way to drag tabs out to get a side-by-side view (shown below).

Download Google Chrome Beta here.

Source: Official Google Chrome Blog