Here’s What Goes Into Making Google Maps, Will Apple Be Able To Recalculate? Everywhere you turned last week, there was another story about iOS 6 Maps. Some feel like it’s a great new direction for Apple, but people like me feel like we’re left with an ugly experience that shouldn’t have been introduced to the public in its current state. Yes, Google Maps was removed from iOS 6, but we’ve known that for quite a while now. What we didn’t know was that Apple would make no real improvements on its own offering from the second developers starting tinkering with the OS until the day it was made public.
As I tried to use Apple Maps for the first time with the first developers version, it felt very unpolished and not well thought out. That’s rare for Apple, so I figured that things would get better. Sadly, they didn’t. Google Maps has been a major player in the maps space since it launched almost eight years ago. Merging the virtual and real-world This is how Weiss-Malik summed up what Google Maps does: Sounds simple, right? Here’s what they get after that process: Project Glass: One day...
Things, not strings. Cross-posted on the Inside Search Blog Search is a lot about discovery—the basic human need to learn and broaden your horizons. But searching still requires a lot of hard work by you, the user. So today I’m really excited to launch the Knowledge Graph, which will help you discover new information quickly and easily. Take a query like [taj mahal]. For more than four decades, search has essentially been about matching keywords to queries. But we all know that [taj mahal] has a much richer meaning. The Knowledge Graph enables you to search for things, people or places that Google knows about—landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more—and instantly get information that’s relevant to your query. Google’s Knowledge Graph isn’t just rooted in public sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook.
The Knowledge Graph enhances Google Search in three main ways to start: 1. 2. 3. Google Maps & Label Readability. Why Google can’t build Instagram. Tonight I was talking with an exec at Google and I brought up the success of Instagr.am (they’ve gotten more than 500,000 downloads in just a few weeks) and asked him “why can’t Google do that?” I knew some of the answers. After all, I watched Microsoft get passed by by a whole group of startups (I was working at Microsoft as Flickr got bought by Yahoo, Skype got bought by eBay, etc etc). I told him a few of my theories, and he told me back what they are seeing internally. Turns out he was talking to me about these items because Google, internally, knows it has an innovation problem (look at Google Wave or Buzz for examples of how it is messed up) and is looking to remake its culture internally to help entrepreneurial projects take hold. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. So, how does a big company innovate?
Another way? Sachin Agarwal, one of the founders of Posterous, echoes these comments in a post about what he learned working at Apple (Small teams rule). So, how about you? Google Launches Blog Finder for Any Topic. Google has quietly launched a new feature: search for blogs on any topic. The company announced the new type of search in a weekly round-up of search updates last week, and respected SEO blogger Bill Slawski argues that the launch may be related to a new Google patent. This has the potential to be a wildly useful service. How many of you have had professional or personal reasons to seek a list of the top blogs on a new topic? I know I, and many people I talk to, find themselves in such need frequently. How do you access the new search? How well does it work? How to Search Google for Blogs by Topic The Google Blogsearch service has for a long time surfaced a small number of blogs related to any search query, above the list of results from a search of blog posts, or entries.
Do a search on the general web search interface, google.com. I searched for ceramics blogs, semantic web blogs, cloud blogs, social media blogs and more. How Good Are the Search Results? That great. Optical character recognition (OCR) in Google Docs - Official Go. A couple of months ago, my co-worker, Mike, showed up at my desk with a pile of paper, each of the yellowed sheets densely covered with an ancient-looking typewriter font. His wife had recently discovered parts of her family chronicles in the attic, typed up by her grandmother many years ago! Now he was wondering if there was a way for her to continue writing the chronicles in Google Docs. The papers sat on my desk for a while, but recently, I returned them to Mike with a smile, cheerfully telling him that what started as my 20% project is now ready for everyone to use -- Google Docs now officially supports importing scanned documents.
What we launched as an experimental feature for the Documents List Data API last year is now available on the upload page: check the “Convert text from PDF or image files to Google Docs documents”, upload your scanned images (JPEG, GIF, PNG) or PDFs, and Google Docs will extract text and formatting from the scans for you to edit away.
Now a Giant, Google Works to Retain Nimble Minds. Google’s Need For Speed Is About Making You Search More. Google’s obsession with speed is well-documented. One of the primary design principles behind its search engine is to return results as fast as possible and strip away anything extra. But its need for speed goes well beyond search. All of Google’s apps are optimized for speed (well, except Gmail lately, but they promise to fix that). The Chrome browser is extremely fast, and the upcoming Chrome OS is also expected to make Web browsing and other computing tasks zippier. It almost doesn’t matter if Google’s Chrome browser and OS gain significant market share or not, as long as they push other browsers and operating systems to keep up in the speed race.
Google can keep trying to make search faster because that is under its control. No wonder Google tries to do everything it can to make the Web faster. It is all about trying to get people to achieve a “flow state” where they are just clicking from one link to the next and it all happens instantaneously. Chrome OS's Secret Influence - PCWorld. When Google gave the first demos of its ChromeOS-based PC this week, there were only a couple of mentions of the new feature that's going to have the greatest impact on Web-based apps, or Web access of any kind, really, during the next few years: offline storage.
HTTP and HTML, the core protocols of the Web, were designed to not store information between browsing sessions unless the user specifically arranged to do it. Cookies, browser caches and other performance-enhancers do store more data between sessions than you'd think (not always the embarrassing stuff, but certainly that seems to be the majority). With current Web browsers, unless you purposely store a Web page to your hard drive, though, you're not going to have it after you relaunch the browser or reboot your machine. That's both a usability and security feature, though neither is effective in that way now. Cookies work the same way -- storing coded information in secret folders in your browser directory.
Openness FTW. Will Google Goggles Get Lost In Translation? Digital Domain - YouTube Wants You to Sit and Stay Awhile - NYTi. But it also used the occasion to express its envy of television’s continuing hold on viewers: “Although the average user spends 15 minutes a day on YouTube, that’s tiny compared to the five hours a day people spend watching TV,” the company observed on its blog. “Clearly, we need to give you more reason to watch more videos!” YouTube, however, faces a huge obstacle: very short videos are unlikely to hold interest when watched in long sequences. It remains to be seen whether viewers will ever be interested in watching hours and hours of typically two-and-a-half-minute videos, even if produced professionally and well matched to individual tastes and moods. The end of a program — whether it has lasted two minutes or two hours — invites consideration of doing something else.
“We’re looking at how to push users into passive-consumption mode, a lean-back experience,” Mr. But an embarrassingly visible portion seems to be of a type that fails to be even entertainingly bad. Google's Video Universe Is Massive. What If Google’s Social Layer Is Chrome? What If Facebook Builds A Browser? Since being wrestled back from Microsoft’s death grip, the web browser has thrived thanks to its openness.
All of the popular browsers beyond IE — Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera — are either based on open-source or have a thriving community that helps develop and expand each of them. And it’s relatively easy for a user to switch between any of them. But what if that were to change? I have no direct knowledge that this is about to happen, but recent conversations have me thinking about this. What if say, Google, in their attempt to finally create a cohesive social experience, decided to forgo building yet another service and instead went for the ultimate layer: the browser?
They could do this, of course, because they make the Chrome web browser. Just imagine a web experience where you signed in once and that was it. That may sound weird, but we’re not that far away from this personalization of the browser. And shortly, Chrome will have its own Web App Store. How will that work?