Google transliteration goes global and in more ways than one.

From post on google official blog by google engineers working on Google transliteration

"..Roman keyboards are the norm in India, making it difficult to type in Indian languages. We decided to tackle this problem by making it very easy to type phonetically using Roman characters and we launched this service as Google Transliteration..."

You can try it hands on here http://www.google.com/transliterate#

In this new version, you can select from one of seventeen supported languages: Arabic,Bengali, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Persian, Punjabi,Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. You can also compose richly formatted text and look up word definitions with our dictionary integration. If the default transliteration is not the word you wanted, you can highlight it to see a list of alternatives. For even finer-grained control, we provide a unicode character picker to allow character-by-character composition.

Apart from this they have also introduced Google Transliteration IME application that can be installed on your desktop(Windows 7/vista/XP) and used to enter text into desktop applications.

http://www.google.com/ime/transliteration/



Google Transliteration IME is currently available for 14 different languages -Arabic, Bengali, Farsi (Persian), Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.

More details about features and config here  http://www.google.com/ime/transliteration/help.html

Google post announcing it http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/transliteration-goes-global.html

Spell check missing from blogger?

As per the blogger help page here

http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=41457

Running Spell Check is very easy - when you're ready to check a post, simply click the Spell Check button:

Spell checker seems to be missing from the menu buttons!!!

Gmail : One button to merge all duplicate contacts

Google added feature to merge all duplicate contacts in your address book. Clicking on a button finds an groups all the duplicate contacts. All similar contacts either by name, email address or contact details are grouped together and can be meregd in a snap.

One more convincing reason to use gmail/google contacts.

More details here http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/one-button-to-merge-all-duplicate.html

Is page speed Influence Google page rankings? Yes it is

Matt cutts has mentioned at pubcon last month that Google considers fastness of the website important for the web and is considering to make this a factor in calulating page rankings.

I think it is a factor even now in the following way. You do a google query and click on the first most relevant link to open the website and website happens to be very slow to load the page. You go back to the results page and click on the second most relevant link and if that happens to be faster than the last website then you spend more time on it. More and more users do it. Google gather this data of click throughs on search result links and uses them to rank position of your webpage on result page. In this sense faster and relevant website will have higher ranking than slower and relevant result.


Using speed purely without relevancy will be suicidial and I am sure google will stay away from something that gives really fast but irrelavnt results to the Google user.

Google announces layoffs at the back of closing Radio ads business

Google have announced that they are exiting Radio Ads business launched in 2006 . Advertisers will be able to continue using it till May 31. Google will also sell Google Audio Automation business and software that automates broadcast Radio programming.

Google has closed quite a few projects in last few including Google notebook, Jaiku etc.

Google also hopes that it will lay off up to 40 people from Radio ads business.

From their blog post.

"We regret the impact these plans will have on the Googlers working on these projects. We hope to find other roles for the majority of the people concerned and will work to make that happen over the next couple of months. However, given that we are exiting the broadcast radio ad business and selling the Radio Automation business, we expect that up to 40 people may not be able to find other roles at Google."

In the same post Google mentions "At Google we've never shied away from high-risk, high-reward projects.......We have always accepted that if you take risks not all of them will pay off."

So Google takes risk and when it does not pay off it it letting the staff go? I think these are the first layoffs from Google other than laying off contractors and recruiters few weeks back.

But is it really not evil to lay off staff when a risk project does not pay off.?

How difficult must it be for Google to absorb these staff in other projects?

Gmail : Add location to your signature

Gmail labs today added a feature which allows user to add a location to the signature of the email. This feature can be enabled from Gmail settings.

Gmail identifies location in 2 ways with different degree of accuracy.

1) By finding location depneding upon IP address of the email sender.
2) By Google Gears location module. (More accurate)

This feature comes from Gmail labs which has been adding features developed by Gmail developers in their 20% time working on the project of their interest. Gmail itself was started as someone's 20% project.

Gmail has been adding feaures to labs quite frequenly over last few weeks. Not all of these features are guranteed to be available. Google has been following model of leaving test new features for its products before adding it for all the users.

Official Gmail blog post

Gmail's better ways to label with "Move to" and auto-complete

When Gmail launched with labels as the only way of organizing emails, it kicked off a big folder vs label debate. Folder had been the de facto way of organizing emails before Gmail.

I have been on the label side of the debate for the following reasons.

1) Multiple labels can be assigned to any one email making it easy to tag emails. eg. you can attach several labels to email like todo, reference, later etc.
2) Labels are easy to search with Gmails' label search using in:label search.
3) Emails are not stored in more than one place as with folders. With folders, a copy is stored in each of the folders if an email needs to be stored in more than one folder.
4) With time, Google has added colours to labels making them easy to distinguish and more usable.

But as the features continue to grow, the complexity of managing the labels has also grown.

For example if you need to add a label to a mail you have to
a) select the email to be labeled
b) click on the actions drop down
c) and then choose a label.

3 Clicks and some scrolling in total for an email or group of emails. Imagine applying 3 labels to 30 emails every day, the situation can become really painful and can statistically speaking become the single most web application responsible for RSI(Repetitive Stress injury)

It can be really cumbersome to do this for 10's of emails every single day. If you also need to archive the emails you have labeled, you will have to follow similar steps or use a keyboard shortcut to do it.

From today Gmail is changing the interface to make these actions easy to do.




There is a Move to drop down which will function as labeling email+ archiving them, moving them out of sight from the inbox with a single action.

Labels now also have a drop down and autocomplete will work which will make applying multiple labels easy. Labels can be applied using shortcut keys. No mouse needed. :)



Another super attempt from Gmail to make using email pain free. Its not available to everyone yet. According to Google it will be rolled out to all the users soon.

Official Gmail announcement about this.

What other activities do you think takes longer than few clicks in Gmail?

Google suggests I might be looking for a replica gun and tries to help me

I searched Google for the word replica and it tried to help me by suggesting to see results for replica guns. :O

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=replica&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

Curious me, I quickly went to Google Adwords Policies page, which prohibits advertisers from advertising for replica and counterfeit goods in following words

"Counterfeit Designer Goods

Don't advertise counterfeit designer goods. Advertising is not permitted for products that are replicas or imitations of designer goods. A replica good contains the trademarked name or logo of a designer brand but is not made by that brand."

It also prohibits advertising for weapons in its Adwords policy.

So you cannot advertise replica products or guns, rightly so. But it is alright for Google to suggest replica guns in its search results???? (see it in screenshot marked with bottom left rectangle.) Another search conducted on Google.com for replica had it suggesting me 'replica watches'

How can Google promote something it prohibits?

It was a human error that almost the entire world wide web was "malware" just yesterday. This looks more like a machine error.

Have you noticed any wierd "see results for:" sections on your search results that are non-appropriate or violation its own policy guidelines?

Update : I got automated reply from adwords team about my reporting to them.

PS: It also allows advertiser to sell $48 replica rolex watch(see the screenshot with marked rectangle on the right. One possible reason the advertiser got away with is because advert uses the word Replice instead of Replica. Good enough to tricks the bots, but I thought adverts were screened by real humans. Doesn't seem so.

What would Google do? for new you

"What would Google do?" is the new book from Jeff Jarvis that asks the question "What would Google do if it was an auto company, a management, a service company, religion, government etc". This questions is more relevant now than ever before.

In the world that has turned upside down and inside out, where Lehman's, Bear Stearn's and Woolworth's are no more and GM's, Ford's and Chrysler are close to getting there, one company defies it all - this doom and gloom. It is THRIVING and not just surviving.

The books aims to deconstruct Google's success from a distance and ponders how it can be applied to us. This book is not about doing things the way Google does. It's about thinking the way Google does and applying it in our lives, career, business; in the world where old rules are getting extinct every passing day.

This book has provoked me to think about few rules Google has changed. By no means this list is exhaustive. The idea of this post, like the book, is to provoke a new way of thinking that is needed to thrive in this new "Google era".

Small is the new Big (Adsense/Adwords)
Open is the new close (API, POP3 and IMAP for Gmail ect)
Listening is the new conversation (Google labs/Gmail Labs)
Less is the new more (Google Home Page)
Free(mium) is the new premium (Google Analytics)
Chaos is the new management (Google video/Youtube/Orkut/Picsa)
20 is the new 80 (Gmail/Google news etc.)

How do you think your life can change thinking the Google way?