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New Google Services Announced
Tryllekunstner writes "The guys at the Google Press Center presented upcoming Google technologies at a press conference. Google Co-op beta is a community where users can contribute their knowledge and expertise to improve Google search for everyone. Google Trends builds on the Google Zeitgeist to help users find facts and trends related to Google usage around the world. Google Notebook is a simple way for users to save and organize their thoughts when conducting research online. This personal browser tool permits users to clip text, images, and links from the pages they're browsing, save them to an online 'notebook' that is accessible from any computer, and share them with others. Also, Google Desktop 4 is also mentioned." Googleblog has an outline of the new services.
The google trends is pretty fun to play with - and like all good tools, it can be used for good or bad.
For instance, British appear to be tit men, whereas Americans are ass men. People from all over the place are searching for osama, but its only people from terrorist cities (like Lahore, Stockholm & San Franscisco) who are searching for usama
A slightly more interesting search is bsd - the top cities searching for BSD are interesting (and the same holds true for linux - where the top city is the converting-to-linux munich)
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Look for it soon in a Theater near you! And what is wrong with this picture...Google Desktop only runs on Windows? What about Linux??
That's funny, it doesn't let me compare searches for "falun gong" or "dalai lama" between, say google.co.uk and google.cn.
Must be a bug of some sort, after all, censorship is evil, right? Right?
The Slashdot Paradox: "100% Overrated"
This personal browser tool permits users to clip text, images, and links from the pages they're browsing, save them to an online 'notebook' that is accessible from any computer, and share them with others. I'm getting the impression that Google is gonna have to go through some heavy flak to get this one off the ground. They've already been in the spotlight for caching copyrighted images and such.
"You will pay for your lack of vision..." - Emperor Palpatine to Ray Charles
It would be nice if they would maintain some of the products they already spewed out or at least issued the occasional bug fix. Picasa2 is a real nice little tool (great for quick fixes and for organizing photos), but it has alot of annoying little bugs that don't seem to have workarounds yet and they have been very slow about releasing updates for it.
Any thoughts from users of Tinderbox or DEVONThink? I'm actually trying to set up a system to organize my rather scattered writing/research efforts, and as I'm looking over the options, this announcement occurs.
My hope is that Notebook is the result of a bunch of PhDs at Google using these other products and thinking, "Hey, we should offer something like that!" Then we might expect some sort of interoperability, or at least import/export -- it would be nice to do stuff in a campus lab and then dump the results to my laptop for later work (unless Notebook is so great I never need advanced functionality from other products). Google Calendar can work with Apple's iCal because they both use the same standard, but there's no such standard AFAIK for the things Notebook would do. (other than plain old text files)
Anyone else notice that the language that searched for 'Sex' the most is Arabic? There's a joke there somewhere, but I'm not doing it..
l &geo=all
http://www.google.com/trends?q=sex&ctab=3&date=al
Yeah google trends seems pretty cool, but 2 things spring to mind.
1)There must be some kind of scaling going on with the numbers, no? How could a country like Pakistan with about 1.7 million internet users have more searches for "Sex" than the US with over 200 million internet users? Similar sitatuation for uncommon languages. Is the data done as a percentage of total searches from that region or in that language?
2)Is the city thing actually accurate? At university, google maps used to figure out I was in Vancouver no problem, but now I'm in Calgary and it doesn't even center on Canada. Wouldn't maps and trends try and figure out my location in the same manner (I would guess by the location of my ISP)
The UK is the most confused, The Norwegians are lost, people from Mexico City are searching for the internet, Seattleites are wondering what Bill Gates is up to, people in Kansas City are cheating at Where's Waldo, Hungarians are hungry for warez, Iranians spell it Googel, the Polish seek the www, and the Japanese are the only ones searching for "/.".
perl language, python language, ruby language. Witness how the rise of ruby in 2005 coincides with the ruby on rails graph.
Prescriptive grammar:linguistics
It's more interesting if you compare a bunch of search terms.
For example, see how Ubuntu took just a year to become top distro. (And also note how popular Suse is with the Germans compared to everyone else.)
For another upstart, how about Slashdot v. Digg?
I can see this becoming the new Googlefight...
It is an interesting tool, but I have one question about it.
Why is it that for pretty much everything, the search volume has decreased over time? Is this because there is less accurate or different data for older searches, or perhaps Google isn't quite as popular today as it was a couple of years ago? I mean, one would think that for most things the search volume should increase over time since more and more people are getting onto the internet and using search engines...