Google News Updates

YouTube is the world’s online video portal, but if a current patent application filed by Google is any indication, it may be looking to become an interactive gaming portal as well.

The patent, “Web-based System for production of Interactive Games Based on Digital Videos,” was filed by Google earlier this year but available this month. Uncovered by BNET, the Google patent seems to detail a system where the creation of video annotations can be used for gaming-like procedure and video behavior change.

The following is the complete abstract from the patent application:

“Systems and methods are provided for adding and displaying interactive annotations for existing online hosted videos. A graphical annotation interface allows the creation of annotations and association of the annotations with a video. Annotations may be of different types and have different functionality, such as altering the appearance and/or behavior of an existing video, e.g. by supplementing it with text, allowing linking to other videos or web pages, or pausing playback of the video. Authentication of a user desiring to perform annotation of a video may be performed in various manners, such as by checking a uniform resource locator (URL) against an existing list, checking a user identifier against an access list, and the like. As a result of authentication, a user is accorded the appropriate annotation abilities, such as full annotation, no annotation, or annotation restricted to a particular temporal or spatial portion of the video.”

While there are previously annotations within YouTube videos, they don’t have this type of functionality. With the behavior described in this patent, you could generate a game that jumps from video to video based on your responses or one that pauses the video and requires you to answer a question before resuming playback. It also has potential applications in advertising mechanics.

It’s difficult to tell just from the patent what Google intends to do with this technology, but the fact that the patent focuses on interactive games gives us our best clue. YouTube-based gaming may be in our not-so-distant future.

One anxiety expressed by India.com’s technology section was whether Google will be able to avoid fake news and bring its users the real story?

It seems that Google is scheduling to release Caffeine in just one data center before plowing it out all over the web. While some sites have reported that there will be changes in search engine rankings, Cutts has been heard saying that this may not be essentially true.

An independent study from Summit Media in September this year also suggests that more weight is expected to be given to news and social media results. The sites that do lose ranking, according to the study, are likely to be the ones relying on old, archived content; the most excellent way, it seems to keep your site’s rankings high with the new Caffeine will be to keep them updated and relevant. That being said, it seems that there have been no changes that give one sector benefit over another.

On top of this new back end development, Google announced recently that it would be extending its personalized results to signed-out users, made likely via an “anonymous cookie in your web browser.” This means that even when users hinder their “web history,” Google can still track their browsing habits. As with many things Google, some cry “genius,” and some cry “big brother.” That said, it is possible to turn off personalization by clicking “disable customization” on that page after you click “Web History”. Otherwise, Google will anonymously track your search habits for 180 days.

It seems that there are some huge changes ahead at Google this coming year that will not only modify the face of the web, but what’s behind it.

Legal battles over Google's U.S. settlement with authors and publishers will stretch into 2010, nearly 15 months after Google first reached an concord with those groups to allow it to continue scanning out-of-print but copyright-protected works. Google is the only association with explicit permission to scan that type of book, which it has been doing since 2005 while claiming that fair-use laws permit such activity.

That agreement, however, applies only to the U.S. and a few other English-speaking countries. Reports surfaced a few months ago that Chinese authors were thinking about ganging up on Google, which is apparently in talks with legislature of those groups but has yet to reach a official agreement.

The U.S. conclusion is still on track for a February hearing to decide whether the revised settlement completed under the Department of Justice's watch should be accepted.

Earlier this month, a French court planned Google to pay 300,000 euros ($430,000) in damages and interest to French company La Martiniere, which had sued the tech giant for copyright contravention for scanning book excerpts to include in its Google Book search results.

Opera 10.5 Alpha may have just become the first web browser to perform faster than Chrome, but it now looks like Google is ready to bring out its major weapon of all as it wages war on rivals.

The Web giant is placing ads on its Google search homepages around the world (including .com) promoting Chrome under the tagline: “A faster way to browse the web”. It also includes a straight link to download the browser.

Why is this so significant? Firstly it is a major break in protocol for Google since it has notably kept its search homepage(s) as minimalistic as possible. Secondly, Google.com is the most visited page on the Internet meaning Chrome is now vigorously being pushed to an unparalleled audience.

The really ingenious part? Google indentifies the browser visiting the page before deciding whether to show the ad or not and it isn’t as simple as Chrome = no ad, everything else = ad. The first division of this sentence is true, Chrome users don’t get an ad while Internet Explorer users do. By contrast Firefox users only get more delicate link to a ‘Google Pack’ of which Chrome is a part of software bundle. This is almost certainly because Firefox is a main Google business partner.

Should you be happy in your browser choice (with IE? Really?) then the Chrome ad can be closed and won’t recur in future. Either way, however, Google ultimately wins since Chrome brand awareness increases and this will certainly help recognition of the similarly named Chrome OS when it ultimately rolls out later next year.

So where is Chrome market share at present? It is just inched past Safari at 4.4 per cent and has been available on the PC for just over a year. This puts it roughly inline with the annual gains made by Firefox, which is at 24.7 per cent after five years. IE still leads the way with 63.6 per cent, though the finalised Windows browser ballot screen could change all that.

If you are considering switching to Chrome then jump on in, the water’s warm. One big tip though: go for the beta version (4.x) , it’s solid as a rock, eliminates the Facebook glitches in the ‘stable’ 3.x edition, is faster and crucially supports third party extensions.

Over the past couple of years, Google Checkout for Non-Profits has helped thousands of organizations collect millions of dollars in donations to support various causes. Google is pleased to announce that it will be extending free donation processing until 2011 for those non-profits who are also members of the Google Grants program. All other non-profits can continue to process donations according to Checkout's standard fee structure. To find out more and to learn about an experiment that Google did on suggested donation amounts, please read our post on the Google Checkout Blog.

This is the first Google logo (aka Google doodle) for the 2009 Christmas holiday season. Google continues the custom of changing its logo for holidays and special occasions by displaying this today.

There is at least one more logo coming, as when you click the logo on Google's home page it takes you to a page with a placeholder for a second logo. And in keeping with Google's current practice of numerous logos for one occasion, it looks like they will be doing more than one for Christmas. Recent multiple-logo examples are seven days of Sesame Street and four Halloween logos.

We hope you enjoy Google's logos. They have become a tradition that many people watch for. And Google keeps receiving more imaginative with them.

The giant "G" is on a shopping binge, as the reports and rumor spread around suggest. Starting with, a report with The New York Times informs that the internet search giant is at present in discussions to acquire the local business review site Yelp. The size of the deal is tipped to be more than US $500 million. If the deal materializes, Google would be able to capture the local markets directly strengthening its position. Yelp was founded in 2004 and has authority in the market for reviews of local businesses and ads in major metros across the US, Canada, UK and Ireland.

Furthermore, Google is closing acquisition of DocVerse for supposed purchase price of around $25 million, reports TechCrunch. DocVerse is a service that offers the users with association platform for the Microsoft Office documents. The company was founded in 2007 by Microsoft veterans Shan Sinha and Alex DeNeui. If Google completes the acquisition, the competition in the Office space will be intensified, especially with Microsoft Office 2010 slated for release.

Well, more to the acquisitions, Google is also planning to buy San Francisco online real estate upstart Trulia. According to a report by Kara Swisher of All Things the Trulia’s estimated valuation ranges between $150 million and $200 million.

Has your company, school or organization decided to "go Google" - but not yet fully "gone?" Perhaps you'd like more direction on the technical, marketing or training details? Or maybe you could use some resources to help you deploy? Making the choice to go Google can be the easiest part, but Google realized that it sometimes takes a little boost to finish the process, which is where it comes in.

The Google Apps Deployment team has assisted hundreds of organizations - large and small - make the switch to Google Apps. To ensure that your implementation is a success, they have developed step-by-step tools to guide you through the process, and best practices to make your transition as smooth and easy as possible. Here are some of the resources you can explore when going Google:

Sign up for a Deployment Training Webinar. In this live session, a deployment professional will walk you through the deployment planning steps and use cases.

Take advantage of our deployment guides, which include inventive examples and templates, to help with your technical and marketing rollout:

• For enterprises
• For small/medium businesses
• For schools

Recently, they also launched two learning sites to jump start your transition to Google Apps: the customizable Google Enterprise Launch Site for large enterprises and the Apps Learning Center for small businesses. You can find out more about these Google site templates in the Enterprise Deployment Site.

To find answers to your technical questions about Google Apps, visit the Administrator Help Center. They also provide overviews and videos for integration and migration tools, including Microsoft Outlook Sync, Google Blackberry Enterprise Server Connector and Lotus Notes Migration. These resources help with your move to Google Apps, and they can't wait to welcome you to the Google Apps family.

Google brought translation features to many of the products in 2009, including Google Docs and Gmail and now it has added one more before the New Year. To make it easier for people around the globe to read the site you created with Google Sites, they have integrated with the Google Translate Element. Now, whenever someone visits a Google Site in another language, they will be given the option to translate the content into the language of their choice. All they have to do is click on the translate link at the bottom right-hand side of the page. Now, the content on your site can be translated into 51 languages, allowing you to reach a whole new audience. Check out this before and after for a Korean school's website below (or try it out for yourself).

In a newspaper, the most vital story is featured on the front page. If it's a really important piece, then it's placed "above the fold," which means you can find it on the top half of the first page, the bottom half is folded behind and isn't readily seen when you first look at the newspaper.

The same idea applies to browsers as well. There's no clear line for "above the fold" on a browser there are many diverse sizes of monitors, browsers are not always full screen and other things like toolbars can take up space. Consider a "Donate" button on a non-profit site. If it's far down the page, you may not see it when you first view the page. You can of course scroll downwards, but many people don't scroll and will miss it entirely. For example, on the download page for Google Earth, the install rate increased by 10% when we moved the "Download" button 100 pixels upward. We can attribute that increase to users who wanted to try out Google Earth, but didn't see the button before.

To help the users understand how everyone sees their website, Google has created a tool called Browser Size in their 20% time. Browser Size is based on a sample of data from visitors to google.com. Special code collects data on the height and width of the browser for a sample of users. For a given point in the browser, the tool will tell you what percentage of users can see it. For example, if an important button is in the 80% region it means that 20% of users have to scroll in order to see it. If you're a web designer, you can use Browser Size to redesign your page to minimize scrolling and make sure that the important parts of the page are always prominent to your audience. People can use this tool to make their websites better, in turn making the web better for everyone.

If you're fascinated in learning more about Browser Size, check out our post on the Google Code Blog.

Google has launched updated versions of the Google Toolbar and FeedBurner that offer a new URL shortening service from Google called the Google URL Shortener.

People share a lot of links online. This is particularly true as microblogging services such as Twitter have developed in popularity. If you're not familiar with them, URL shorteners basically squeeze a long URL into fewer characters to make it easier to share with others. With character limits in tweets, status updates and other modes of short form publishing, a shorter URL leaves more room to say what's on your mind and that's why people use them.

First, the people who use the Google Toolbar and FeedBurner will benefit from a shortener that is easily available making it faster and easier to share, post and email links. Second, this is built on Google's global infrastructure to offer the following benefits:

• Stability: Google's scalable, multi-datacenter infrastructure provides great uptime and a consistent service to our users.
• Security: As with web search, shortened URLs are mechanically checked to detect sites that may be malicious and warn users when the short URL resolves to such sites.
• Speed: Google is working hard to ensure this service is quick. They will continue to iterate and improve the speed of Google Url Shortener.

Google URL shortener is not a stand-alone service; you can't use it to shorten links directly. Currently, Google URL Shortener is only accessible from the Google Toolbar and FeedBurner. If the service proves useful, they may eventually make it available for a wider audience in the future.

Google has been busy working on even more ways to make web browsing easier and more fun. First off is the new Share feature in Toolbar for Internet Explorer and Firefox. This makes it easy for the users to share any page on the web with their friends over various social networks, blogs or email.

You can just as easily share to Blogger, Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Gmail or other services. For those who use frequently, you can save a step by including them as buttons in the settings option in the Share menu. Google has also integrated with more local social networks for example, if you're in Japan, you can share with your friends on Hatena.

With this new release, Google also "graduated" the My Location feature from Toolbar Labs. It's now available in Toolbar for Internet Explorer (Firefox already has a similar feature built in to the browser). After you authorize Toolbar to detect your location, you can simply search [coffee] and Toolbar will return search results targeted to your location. This is done without associating location information with your Google Account.

Here's a video demo of these features.

Last but certainly not least, Google Sidewiki is now available in nearly all Toolbar languages, and as a Chrome extension. To try it out, download the latest release, code-named Dangermouse.

If you thought your 5Mbps home broadband connection was fast, then think again and take a look at a new Google-backed 17Tbps fat pipe intended for Southeast Asia.

Admittedly, the undersea Southeast Asia Japan Cable (SJC) is planned to be shared by more than a few people when it hooks up Singapore, Japan and points in between in 2012, but it's still an inspiring feat.

The $400m (£245m) is being funded by Google and various Asian partners in an effort to develop internet connections in countries including Thailand and the Philippines.

With a capacity equal to a quarter of a billion normal phone lines, the 17Tbps SJC connection will span more than 5,000 miles of cable and might be upgraded to run as fast as 23Tbps should there be a need in future.

Apprehending the fact that social media and real-time search is of as much worth for businesses as for consumers, Google announced that its Google Search Appliance the company’s search hardware for businesses will now offer results from Twitter, over and above the traditional Google search results.

With Google already having ensured the accessibility of related Web results from the public Web to the Google Search Appliance customers, the addition of Twitter results will not only further develop the extent of information that users will see, but also provide a real-time glimpse of trends and issues amongst the masses.

Announcing the incorporation of real-time search results from Twitter in the Google Search Appliance, Google product manager Cyrus Mistry said in a blog post: “Social information is essential for businesses: Employees searching for information needed to do their jobs promote from real-time news too.”

Further elaborating the advantages of real-time search for businesses, Mistry added: “They might be increasing a new breakfast cereal, or designing a marketing plan for a clothing line, or writing strategy report for a political campaign. In all of these cases, understanding what is being said just as Twitter users are saying it can be invaluable.”

Today, at the International Climate Change Conference (COP15) in Copenhagen, Google demonstrated a new technology prototype that enables online, global-scale observation and measurement of changes in the earth's forests. This technology will help stop the destruction of the world's rapidly-disappearing forests. Emissions from tropical deforestation are comparable to the emissions of all of the European Union, and are greater than those of all cars, trucks, planes, ships and trains worldwide.

According to the Stern Review, protecting the world's standing forests is a highly cost-effective way to cut carbon emissions and mitigate climate change. The United Nations has proposed a framework known as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries) that would provide economical incentives to rainforest nations to protect their forests, in an effort to make forests worth "more alive than dead." Implementing a global REDD system will require that each nation have the ability to accurately monitor and report the state of their forests over time, in a manner that is independently verifiable. However, many of these tropical nations of the world lack the technological resources to do this, so Google is working with scientists, governments and non-profits to change this.

This shows deforestation and degradation in Rondonia, Brazil
from 1986-2008, with the red indicating recent activity

As a Google.org product, this technology will be provided to the world as a not-for-profit service. This technology prototype is presently available to a small set of partners for testing purposes it's not yet accessible to the general public but it is expected to be broadly available over the next year. Google is working with many individuals and organizations (find full list here) in developing this technology in particular the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Google is also working with the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), a consortium of national government bodies, inter-governmental organizations, space agencies and research institutions through GEO's Forest Carbon Tracking (FCT) task force. Last month together they launched the GEO FCT portal and are now exploring how they can also together bring the power of this new technology to tropical nations.

The red "hotspots" indicate deforestation
that has happened within the last 30 days

Blogs, wikis, social networks, YouTube and Twitter are changing how many of us connect with others. Yet within the majority of businesses, especially large corporations, the software hasn't evolved much over the last decade. While conventional business technologies give companies the essential safety and controls, they do so at the expense of fast innovation. Businesses shouldn't have to make this conciliation.

This is one reason why customers are so excited about Google Apps. It offers enterprise-grade safety and control while letting businesses instantly tap into a swift stream of innovation, based on services tested by hundreds of millions of people around the world. Google has launched over 100 improvements to Google Apps in the last year, and the pace of innovation continues to increase.

Google has announced the launch of Google Groups to Google Apps Premier and Education Edition users. Google Groups is one of our most widely used applications, enabling each one from the local hiking club to the family next door to generate mailing lists and discussion forums. Now employees within a company can create groups for their departments, their teams or their projects. Employees can use these groups as mailing lists, but they can also share documents, spreadsheets, presentations, calendars, videos and sites with groups, instead of many individual recipients. They can choose to receive communications directly to their email inbox, in a digest format, or in the Groups forum view, and can access all the information in the groups archive, without the intervention of an IT administrator.

Google Groups is a boon for IT administrators too. After enabling the innovative service from the administrative control panel (add "user-managed groups"), users can start running their own groups without burdening administrators for support. Administrators can still set group policies and manage other group settings. If you want to learn more, check out the post on the Enterprise Blog.

Google Groups is just one of the many consumer features that Google has tailored for the enterprise since they launched Google Apps for businesses nearly three years ago, and they are looking forward to bringing more innovation to all the users in the months and years ahead.

Do you ever wonder what's going on within the browser when a webpage doesn't load or react as quickly as it should? Many developers do, especially when trying to build influential web applications for their users.

But up until now, it's been complex for developers to identify problems in a slow-to-respond application. Google at Google Campfire One was happy to announce that they are adding a new tool to Google Web Toolkit called Speed Tracer.

Speed Tracer is a Google Chrome extension that allows developers to identify performance problems in their web apps using a "Sluggishness Graph," in combination with many other metrics. In the spirit of clean, easy design, developers need only look at the Y-Axis of their application's Sluggishness Graph to see how they're doing :

• If the y-axis is close to zero, then the app is fast
• If the y-axis registers around 100%, then the app is, well, sluggish

And in either case, Speed Tracer provides lots of extra data to help identify any particular performance issue.

The developers will find that Speed Tracer looks under the covers of web applications like never before. In fact, Google even used Speed Tracer to optimize the performance of Speed Tracer itself! (It's really an HTML application after all, built with Google Web Toolkit, and deployed as a Google Chrome extension.) If you're a web developer, download and install Speed Tracer on the Google Chrome Developer Channel.

This is one of many other improvements in GWT 2.0 which Google released in Campfire that makes building web applications fast, and the applications you build run even faster. Check out the Google Code Blog for more information and to watch our Campfire One developer announcement.

Previously, Google offered only Personalized Search for signed-in users, and only when they had Web History enabled on their Google Accounts. What Google has done now is expanding Personalized Search so that they can provide it to signed-out users as well. This addition enables us to customize search results for you based upon 180 days of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser. It's completely separate from your Google Account and Web History. You'll know when they will customize results because a "View customizations" link will appear on the top right of the search results page. Clicking the link will let you see how Google customized your results and also let you turn off this type of customization.

Check out Google’s help center for more details on personalized search, how they customize results and how you can turn off personalization. Learn more by watching the video:

When you type http://www.wikipedia.org/ into your browser's address bar, you wait for nothing less than to be taken to Wikipedia. Chances are you're not giving much consideration to the work being done in the background by the Domain Name System, or DNS.

As part of Google’s ongoing effort to make the web faster, they have launching their own public DNS resolver called Google Public DNS. Most of us aren't familiar with DNS because it's often handled mechanically by our Internet Service Provider (ISP), but it provides an important function for the web. You could think of it as the switchboard of the Internet, converting easy-to-remember domain names e.g., http://www.google.com/ into the unique Internet Protocol (IP) numbers e.g., 74.125.45.100 that computers use to converse with one another.

The regular Internet user ends up performing hundreds of DNS lookups each day, and some multifarious pages require multiple DNS lookups before they start loading. This can sluggish down the browsing practice. The research has shown that speed matters to Internet users, so over the past several months the Google team engineers have been working to make improvements to the public DNS resolver to make users' web-surfing experiences faster, safer and more reliable. You can read about the exact technical improvements made in the product documentation and get installation instructions from the product website of Google.

If you're web-savvy and contented with changing your network settings, check out the Google Code Blog for complete instructions and more information on how to set up Google Public DNS on your computer or router.

As people begin to use Google Public DNS, Google has planned to share what we learn with the broader web community and other DNS providers, to improve the browsing experience for Internet users globally. The goal of Google Public DNS is to benefit users worldwide while also helping the tens of thousands of DNS resolvers improve their services, eventually making the web faster for everyone.

For the past few months, the google has been experimenting with homepage designs like this and have run numerous live tests on the site. They do these live tests they are making a change that they think may fundamentally affect how people use the site.

All in all, they have run approximately 10 variants of the fade-in. Some of the experiments delayed the user experience: for example, the variants of the homepage that hid the search buttons until after the fade performed the nastiest in terms of user happiness metrics. Other variants of the experiment produced hilarious outcomes when joint with our doodles the barcode doodle combined with the fade was particularly ironic in its overstated minimalism. However, in the end, the variant of the homepage they have launched was positive or neutral on all key metrics, except one: time to first action. Google is all about getting you where you are going faster.

Internally, a huge number of Google employees have been using the new homepage. It represents focus on great search yet helps searchers efficiently access all of Google's products. Like the new supersized search box they launched several months ago, this change is one that is very obvious at first, and then quickly becomes second nature.

Visit the competition website for more information about prizes, judging and rules. You'll also find an obliging FAQ and a catalog of steps that should help you get started. The deadline for submission is three months away it's not too early to form a team, take images and start construction.