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.