Sergey Brin is telling employees to stop making old products and start improving new ones. "For example, said Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, Google plans to combine its spreadsheet, calendar and word-processing programs into one suite of Web-based applications."

Travel site Amadeus.net has put together a useful page full of printable subway maps for all over the world.

All major American cities are covered here, as well as subway systems in Europe, Australia, Africa, and Asia. The maps come in a printable .pdf form. We've definitely blogged about subway maps before, but this is actually one of the better sites I've seen for accuracy. — Wendy Boswell

Just a couple of hours to go and it will be clear which movie is getting the Oscar for best film.

I was wondering whether Google Trends will have any predictive value and did 3 Trend searches.

Release dates and other factors haven’t been taken into consideration and the whole exercise is in no way scientific, just in case I’m wrong, I mean just in case Google is wrong.

I started with the names of the movies

The timeline shows that The Queen and Babel already had searches years before the movie was even aired. This makes sense as there are many queens in this world and Babel goes back to the Bible. Babel has the lead though.

I narrowed the search by using the names of the movies + the word “movie”

The Departed was doing pretty well but peaked to early. Again it’s Babel that is on top.

And for a final check I performed a search for “movie name” plus the word “film”.

Babel is also in the lead for this search, with a big distance to the rest. Letters of Iwo Jima is nowhere to be found.

If it’s up to Google the movie Babel will get the four kilograms. Who do you think will win?

Note: Images are externally hosted, please reload if you don’t see them.
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Gemme van Hasselt is an Internet Marketing Consultant, living in Shanghai, and owner of thé China Directory.

The Chinese New Year is a week old now and slowly life is getting back to normal in China. Even the firecrackers will stop waking me up at 6 in the morning, at least that’s what I hope. It’s the year of the golden pig, supposedly a lucky year to have a baby and I imagine pigs, babies and related will be much searched words this year.

Despite the family meals and fire works there is some noteworthy news. Baidu is really set on entering the Japanese market, Google.cn keeps on filtering and Microsoft doesn’t want the Chinese to see any video.

Baidu in Japan

Sometime ago Baidu announced they intended to conquer the Japanese market. At the time I felt it a rather surprising move as the Japanese search engine market is already full and I still can’t imagine that Japanese searchers are waiting for a search engine that is backed by the Chinese government and is heavy on the censoring side.

Baidu wants to venture out as growth in the Chinese market, where they have a very strong lead, seems to approaching it’s peak and competition for advertisers is intensifying.

From Business Week

In the fourth quarter, Baidu only added 6,000 new customers on a base of more than 100,000 advertisers. Google and Yahoo! aren’t the only ones going after Baidu’s core business. Local players such as portal Sohu.com and Shenzhen-based instant-messaging provider Tencent are also boosting their Chinese-language search offerings.

The domain for baidu.jp is up and has the message they are in the process of spidering the Japanese pages. At least that’s what I make of the translation

Censorship and Auto-completion

Censorship is the ongoing drag here in China. Philip Lenssen writes on Webpronews that Google.cn is now filtering images.

Google Images China censors hundreds of thousands to millions of photos – from friend to foe. For example, no single photo shows for politician and “friend” Deng Xiaoping in a search for his name. China’s current leader Hu Jintao gets the same massive censorship treatment, as a search for added by G.> reveals. This may well be more than a plain domain blacklist, because it’s of such broad scale.

Indeed, a search for Hu Jin Tao (in Chinese) on Google.cn results in the message “cannot be found”. Even turning off ’safe search’ doesn’t help. The upside here is that most Chinese users of Google use Google.com instead of Google.cn. A search there gives you plenty of pictures

Philip wrote another article about how Google.cn has enabled auto-completion by default. I typed in (in Chinese) again the name of Hu Jin Tao and expected that after the first character “Hu” I would get a suggestion for the name of China’s President. This didn’t happen and using the name of prime minister Wen Jia Bao also failed to suggest me.

The first image is a search for “New Year”, the second for “Hu Jin Tao”.

Philip is probably right with his guess that this may well be more than a plain blacklist. I can’t see the reason why this is done, there’s hardly anything sensitive about pictures of Chinese leaders or auto complete suggestions for their name. Or could it be that the number of results displayed next to the suggestion is the issue?

Unavailability of Video from Abroad

When Google Video launched I was curious and tried to view some of the uploaded files. I got the message:

Thanks for your interest in Google Video. Currently, the playback feature of Google Video isn’t available in your country.
We hope to make this feature available more widely in the future, and we really appreciate your patience.

My patience is wearing thin by now and I hope they appreciate it.

Last week, Microsoft launched their own video sharing website, named Soapbox. Going there I got the message,

Why would Soapbox limit itself to certain markets? Isn’t the Internet a worldwide thing? I guess not. Meanwhile Youtube, part of Google, is available. Not that it matters that much as China has already many local video sharing websites that are heavily competing each other.

Internet Addiction Cures

I’m addicted to the Internet, I admit it. I spend many hours during the day looking at a screen, reading, working, uploading, downloading, buying and selling. The only thing I don’t do yet is playing online games.

In China, playing games online is one of the most favorite activities for the young generation. Internet bars are full off kids and teenagers shooting virtual bullets and apparently it’s getting out of hand as a recent survey found that almost 14% of Chinese teenagers are prone to get addicted to the Internet

From the Washington Post

The Chinese government has launched a nationwide campaign to stamp out what the Communist Youth League calls “a grave social problem” that threatens the nation.

In the Internet-addiction campaign, the government is helping to fund eight in-patient rehabilitation clinics across the country.

The clinic in Daxing, a suburb of Beijing, the capital, is the oldest and largest, with 60 patients on a normal day and as many as 280 during peak periods. Few of the patients, who range in age from 12 to 24, are here willingly. Most have been forced to come by their parents, who are paying upward of $1,300 a month — about 10 times the average salary in China — for the treatment.

Led by Tao Ran, a military researcher who built his career by treating heroin addicts, the clinic uses a tough-love approach that includes counseling, military discipline, drugs, hypnosis and mild electric shocks.

Stop reading, turn off your computer and do something useful:)

Wish you all a Happy Year of the Pig

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Gemme van Hasselt is an Internet Marketing Consultant, living in Shanghai, and owner of thé China Directory.

Wouldn’t it be neat if Google offered developers a way to write scripts to extend the functionality of Google Writely, Google Spreadsheets, Gmail and so on? Right now, if you want to do this you have to go for things like user stylesheets or Greasemonkey scripts, or other specific Firefox extensions, all approaches that are sub-optimal at best because installing them takes a certain browser and isn’t really “one-click” easy, and there’s also the risk you disobey the Google terms of service.

An officially supported Google Apps add-on API – sort of like macros for Microsoft Office, but something different than Google’s current Apps API – on the other hand would guarantee easy installation. Additionally, Google could then link to these extensions right from the specific product pages. E.g. a link at the top right side of your Gmail account may bring you straight to the Gmail add-ons of the Google Apps API directory. You could then subscribe to several extensions, Personalized Homepage directory-style, and extend your Google Apps with new functionality.

I could imagine a wide variety of specific tools. A Google Docs (Writely) plug-in may add syntax highlighting to the document for source code. A plug-in for Gmail may skin the appearance of your emails and increase the font size. A Spreadsheets plug-in may generate charts (until Google delivers this feature themselves – and indeed, Google may sometimes be inspired by Google Apps API plug-in functionality and mine these for stuff they then implement for all users). A specific community may see the need for a very specific add-on, and simply go ahead and create it.

As ever so often, some developers may want more “return” from creating these scripts free for users. This is one of the current problems with the Google Gadgets (aka modules) approach: there’s often little incentive for gadget developers to develop gadgets, and many end up being self-promotion tools, sometimes bordering on spam. There’s a simple solution for this: all Google Apps products – I guess – will include ads in the future (targeted to the document at hand, e.g. an ad for cooking books if you open a Thai Curry Chicken recipe in Google Docs). So Google would simply need to allow developers to associate their add-ons with their AdSense account, and then show a percentage of AdSense for the developer’s account for every installed plug-in. This way, a popular plug-in may make the developer some money on the side and convince them to optimize it, support it, and create new plug-ins.

The Google Apps extension API would solve another problem; right now, it’s a big hack to add functionality via Greasemonkey, user stylesheets and so on. For one thing, you rely on flaky HTML source code specifics; you’re basing your scripts on specifics of Google apps output that may not exist in another month. And also, programming in such a way is not the most pleasant experience. It would be much easier for developers to code against a structured object exposing certain attributes.

A Google Office add-on API does not come without risk, though. The biggest risk would be security. If Google wouldn’t get the security model right, even more Google office vulnerability holes would be discovered; this would be like those nasty insecure macros of the Microsoft Word era. Like with Google Gadgets today, Google would need to communicate clearly to end-users that add-ons may be unsafe, and possibly disallow add-ons to transfer apps-internal data (say, a Gmail email which contains your password) to outside sites. Furthermore, supporting add-ons would increase work for Google’s helpline. People might now call in because they see a Google Spreadsheets bug when actually it’s only a Spreadsheets add-on bug (and even if it’s not, Google can’t know this, and they need to investigate with more possibilities in mind, slowing down the investigation).

So why would Google want to provide all this add-on stuff? To be nice and make developers some spare-change? No – but to have a great web apps platform because there are hundreds to thousands of great add-ons for users. This way, they can better compete with tools from Microsoft. The costs of switching will be increased for users, hence make Google Apps more sticky, because even if Microsoft wakes up and creates a webified office, users might lose all their work- or community-specific add-ons when they turn away from Google.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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Brian Mingus emails this:

<<Some webmasters seem to be convinced that Google spies on them with the Google Toolbar, tries random directories in an effort to dig content out of the deep web, and other tactics. I have recently tried to keep a web server private to only a small group of people, without any authentication, and quickly realized one way that Google figures this out. Perhaps you knew about it – I think its non-obvious.

The problem is with http referrers, and millions of people publishing their web logs. Google these phrases to see the web logs:

“Generated by Webalizer”
“Created by awstats”

If you link to someone’s website, they can search their logs and find out. You might not care, as long as they don’t link to you. But in my case they inadvertently linked to me through their published web logs and Google then came along and spidered their web logs. Game over – I’ve been found out!

So if you want to do what I am doing, (this is a wiki), you have to instruct people to insert plain text urls only[*]. Because the instant someone clicks on a url from your site, there is a chance you have exposed yourself.>>

*Or you can password-protect the site, of course.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

[Advertisement] Bloggers, increase your ad revenue: make contextual ad networks compete (for free).   [Advertise here]

I was asked by a client to make a check list of every employment law issue that might arise in a merger situation. That's a huge question and I wasn't sure that I would hit every issue — especially the benefits issues since I don't often practice in employee benefits matters. I typed a search into Google ("employment law issues in mergers and acquisitions") and the first hit was a book reference to Employee Benefits in Mergers and Acquisitions by Ilene Ferenczy. The Google Book Search link gave me the table of contents and some other information — more than enough to tell me that this was a great book for my project.

Searching Google further, I was able to determine that the book was at a library in Chicago. I thought about purchasing the book but it sells for approximately $800. My local law library tried to arrange to borrow the book, but ended up buying it when it looked like the inter-library loan would be a problem.

Thursday marks ResearchBuzz’ 400th issue. The Web site that became ResearchBuzz started in April 1998, with the newsletter starting in October 1998. 400 issues! Almost nine years! I’m pretty amazed.

To celebrate, I’ve made several upgrades and changes to the site.

1) Full-text RSS feeds — I’ve always been pretty resistant to full-text feeds because even without them, I’ve had problems with my content being grabbed by scrapers and reproduced without attribution or permission. But I’m trying them now in the hope that reader happiness outweighs scraper naughtiness. (I’ve also done a couple of other little site things, like upgrading WP and finally fixing the domain so the landing page is actually www.researchbuzz.org/wp .)

2) Massive Kebberfegg update — As you might remember, Kebberfegg ( Kebberfegg.com ) is a tool to generate keyword-based RSS feed without having to run around to a bunch of search engines. It launched in October 2005. I have updated it now so that it generates over 55 feeds in eleven different categories. Of course it’s still free to use, and a very fast way to generate LOTS of keyword-based feeds!

3) New Search Engine — SearchOfficialBlogs.com — Last June, I mused about an official corporate blog filter. With the advent of the Google Custom Search Engine I figured it would be a good time to try to build one. SearchOfficialBlogs.com searches over 140 different official blogs — from politicians, celebrities, musicians, companies, institutions, etc.

4) New Search Engine — JustAskAnybody.com — 100 Ask-An-Expert and advice sites and pages, all gathered together via Google Custom Search Engine in one giant search engine of massive expertise. Get lots of answers with a simple search at JustAskAnybody.com .

5) More virtuality — More developing and planning is going on in Second Life (virtual classes in information trapping are being mapped out), and I think I’ll be moving soon from my current location to a larger site with more prims and some serious mad scientist-ing. Visiting ResearchBuzzSL.com will take you to a slurl.com map of the current digs. More details on the way.

Everybody, thanks so much for reading and supporting ResearchBuzz. You’re awesome.

• News sources such as the New York Times publish feeds of their latest stories
• Companies like Apple publish feeds of their press releases, as well as a few other feeds.
  
• Blogs including the Official Google Blog publish feeds with their latest posts
• Shopping sites like Buy.com publish feeds with noteworthy deals

Genealogy site Ancestry.com has announced a huge new collection of African-American family history records, though compared to the passenger list collection it’s being positively chintzy with the free access (sign up for a free account and get three days free access, as opposed to “free access until the end of November”.)

This collection includes more than 55 million African-American family history records includes US Colored Troops service records, Freedmen’s Bureau records, and narratives from 3,500 former slaves. (Southern Claims Commission records are on the way.) The US Federal Census collection, which spans 1790-1930, has been upgraded to users can search for African-American entries (there are 53 million of them in the census.)

To get more information, visit the collection directly at http://www.ancestry.com/aahistory .

This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .

Not so much blog posting this week, as I’m trying to get as much as I can from visiting Dublin. I’ll talk about more later.

Highlight so far include
- meeting lots of fantastic Google colleagues in the Dublin office. It was hard to tear myself away today because I was having such a good time talking to people.
- visiting the Guiness Storehouse.
- taking a short train ride to Howth this weekend.

I’ll try to get some pictures and comments about SES London up at some point.