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The Death of Google Buzz Officially in Sight

October 16, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Google is nuking its Twitter clone in a couple of weeks in favor of loving its new social website big-time.

Zoom

Friday Google said in a blog that it plans to kill Google Buzz and the Buzz API in a couple of weeks. The news isn’t surprising given that the Twitter clone really never caught on, and that Google’s new social site is “all the buzz” for the immediate future.

“In a few weeks we’ll shut down Google Buzz and the Buzz API, and focus instead on Google+,” the company said. “While people obviously won’t be able to create new posts after that, they will be able to view their existing content on their Google Profile, and download it using Google Takeout.”

The news arrives after Google recently said that it plans to shut down additional services like Notebook, Aardvark, Google Desktop, Google Pack and more. Friday Google added that Google Labs, Code Search and the Code Search API will be discontinued in January 2012 as well as Jaiku, a product Google acquired back in 2007 that let users send updates to friends, and the social features in iGoogle.

via The Death of Google Buzz Officially in Sight.

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Official Google Blog: Mining patterns in search data with Google Correlate

May 27, 2011 By Leave a Comment

It all started with the flu. In 2008, we found that the activity of certain search terms are good indicators of actual flu activity. Based on this finding, we launched Google Flu Trends to provide timely estimates of flu activity in 28 countries. Since then, we’ve seen a number of other researchers—including our very own—use search activity data to estimate other real world activities.

However, tools that provide access to search data, such as Google Trends or Google Insights for Search, weren’t designed with this type of research in mind. Those systems allow you to enter a search term and see the trend; but researchers told us they want to enter the trend of some real world activity and see which search terms best match that trend. In other words, they wanted a system that was like Google Trends but in reverse.

This is now possible with Google Correlate, which we’re launching today on Google Labs. Using Correlate, you can upload your own data series and see a list of search terms whose popularity best corresponds with that real world trend.

via Official Google Blog: Mining patterns in search data with Google Correlate.

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Google’s Answer to the Facebook “Like” Button: The “+1”

March 30, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Google is making a big new push into social with a feature called “+1” that is similar in purpose to the Facebook “Like” button, but integrated directly into the world’s biggest search engine.

Starting Wednesday, users that opt into the +1 button experiment (and soon everyone else) in Google Labs will start seeing a +1 icon next to each link in Google search results.

Google defines this action as a “public stamp of approval,” and it is exactly that. When you +1 something, your name becomes associated with that link “in search, on ads, and across the web,” according to the company. It also shows up in a feed on your Google Profile, which is required to use the product.

via Google’s Answer to the Facebook “Like” Button: The “+1”.

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Google Labs Spawns Data Explorer

March 19, 2010 By

Yet another creature has crawled out of the muck that is the mad scientist home of Google Labs (news, site). This one’s intent on helping you visualize and explore publicly-available data.

Why the Public Data Explorer?

Following on the heels of efforts in the US and UK to get public data online and mined in an infinite variation of ways, Google Labs has now launched the Public Data Explorer. According to Google, this project “makes large datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate.”

As far as brand new ideas and technologies go, this one’s a bit of an also-ran (and is built on tech that Google acquired in 2007). Everyone and their brother is going after the issue of making sense out of massive public datasets right now. Why now? Because we finally have two critical pieces of the puzzle:

  • The raw computing power to handle extremely large public datasets
  • The in-development protocols for the semantic web, which make it possible to break these datasets down into context that computers can make sense of

So No Big Deal?

Well, don’t be so fast to judge. The issue of visualizing and exploring large public datasets is a young field with plenty of room for advancements. A lot of the charts today’s tools generate are complex and incomprehensible to the average person, though they’re exciting as far as the bleeding edge of technology.

There’s plenty of room to innovate in this space, and in ways no one has thought of yet. So an organization with the size and collective mind-power of Google has a shot at making leaps that could amaze us all. Or not. It’s all in the implementation.

via Google Labs Spawns Data Explorer.

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Finding awesome stuff online with Google Reader Play | Official Google Blog

March 10, 2010 By

I use Google Reader a lot — not only to stay on top of the news, but also to find interesting blog posts and articles. I’m always telling my friends about Google Reader, and while some of them love it, others don’t want to take the time to set it up. For those of you who fall into this second category, we’re announcing Google Reader Play, a new product that makes the best stuff in Reader more accessible for everyone. Reader Play is a new way to browse interesting stuff on the web, customized to the topics you’re interested in, with no setup required.

Items in Reader Play are presented one at a time, and images and videos are automatically enlarged to maximize the viewing experience. We use the technology behind Recommended Items in Reader to populate Reader Play with the most interesting content on the web. While you don’t need a Google account to use Reader Play, your experience will be personalized if you sign in. As you browse, you can let us know which items you enjoy by clicking the “like” button, and we'll use that info to show you other content we think you’ll enjoy.

We think Reader Play is a fun way to browse interesting items online that you wouldn’t find otherwise. We designed it especially for people who don’t want to spend time curating their own set of feeds — but folks who already use Reader can easily use it to read their feeds as well. Just click the feed settings menu on any feed in Reader and select “View in Reader Play.” We’re launching Reader Play as an experiment in Google Labs so that we can test it out, get feedback from you and then improve it as quickly as possible. Visit google.com/reader/play to give it a try, and let us know what you think!

via Official Google Blog: Finding awesome stuff online with Google Reader Play.

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Google Fusion Tables, free service for sharing and visualizing data online

December 15, 2009 By Leave a Comment

What is Fusion Tables? A product launched recently in Google Labs, Fusion Tables is a free service for sharing and visualizing data online. It allows you to upload data, share and mark up your data with collaborators, merge data from multiple tables, and create visualizations like charts and maps.

Do you have data you need to share with other organizations? In Fusion Tables, you can share all or part of a table with other people. Does your data mean more when seen together with other datasets you don't own? By merging your data with other people’s shared tables, you can see the whole picture in one place, discuss the data in embedded comments, and mark up the data with your collaborators. Fusion Tables keeps track of who contributed each part of the data and who has permission to edit.

[continued]  Google Code Blog.

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Future Legal Technology Tool? Similar Images graduates from Google Labs

October 28, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Similar Images is graduating from Google Labs and becoming a permanent feature in Google Images. You can try it out by clicking on “Find similar images” below the most popular images in our search results. For example, if you search for jaguar, you can use the “Find similar images” link to find more pictures of the car or the animal.

via Official Google Blog: Similar Images graduates from Google Labs.

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