By JortK on February 9, 2010
In Douglas Adams’s humorous sci-fi novel series Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy a special kind of fish is mentioned — the Babel Fish. When inserted into the ear, it translates any spoken language into whichever language the listener understands. It is a very nifty device, and now Google seeks to create something similar.
According to Times [...]
Posted in google | Tagged android, google, mobile, speech, translation
By JortK on February 8, 2010
This week, we’re launching two new features to help you manage the waves you create: making participants read-only and restoring a wave to an earlier state.
Read-Only Participants
The creator of a wave can now change other participants on the wave between full access and read-only by clicking on their picture at the top of the wave [...]
Posted in google | Tagged features, google, wave
By JortK on February 8, 2010
You might not know this, but there’s a hidden Labs widget in Gmail that lets you perform Google searches without leaving your e-mail interface. The news today is that it just got a whole slew of useful new features.
Many Google() employees get to spend 20% of their time brainstorming and executing their own personal pet [...]
Posted in google | Tagged gmail, google, integration, labs, search
By JortK on February 8, 2010
Hello again. I’ve been taking advantage of my 20% time to make some improvements in the Google Search lab I told you about last April. For starters, I’ve hooked up a bunch of Google’s most popular search features, including:
Dictionary definitions: use a keyword like “define” in English and you’ll see the first definition of the [...]
Posted in google | Tagged gmail, google, labs, search
By JortK on February 8, 2010
Though the championship title is still up for grabs, it looks like fans have declared the New Orleans Saints the winner of the ‘Search Superbowl.’ Over the last seven days, web search interest in both the Saints and the Colts has increased tremendously. In fact, users have been searching for information on the Saints at [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged google, retail, superbowl
By JortK on February 8, 2010
Google keeps adding new features to Google Maps and Google Earth. The latest: As of today you can type in a restaurant or other place you like in Google Maps and receive recommendations of nearby places you might like just as much or more.
Sure, it’s not quite as radical as something like the rumored store [...]
Posted in google | Tagged google, maps, suggest
By JortK on February 8, 2010
Ever since Oracle closed on its acquisition of MySQL, the open-source world has been wondering where the code has gone. Many people searched, fruitlessly, for the formerly available MySQL source code.
They might have done better to search for Oracle’s point person on MySQL, Ken Jacobs.
On Friday, Jacobs announced his resignation from Oracle to key members [...]
Posted in MySQL | Tagged MySQL, oracle
By JortK on February 8, 2010
In addition to language improvements this week, we released several other new features:
Haitian Creole translation
We’ve now added Haitian Creole (kreyòl ayisyen) translation to Google Translate, so that you can translate between Creole and 51 other languages, and also hear spoken versions of Creole translations. While this translation system is still evolving (when translating to/from Creole, [...]
Posted in google | Tagged google, search, translation