Wednesday, December 23, 2009Looking Back again at Google in 2009
Google is maybe our decade’s Xerox PARC with a commercial edge, and the speed at which they released products in 2009 was quite immense. This shows they do two things well so far: scaling technology (across different countries and languages, across hundreds of thousands or however many computers), and scaling employee count (nearly twenty-thousand employees and still stuff gets done, from small to big apps). Google is also getting bolder in their attitude; while their older mission poster used to read that Google should “Think and act like an underdog”, a recent Google writing proclaimed a bit of a different angle:
Because of our reach, technical know-how, and lust for big projects, we can take on big challenges that require large investments and lack an obvious, near-term pay-off. We can photograph the world’s streets so that you can explore the neighborhood around an apartment you are considering renting from a thousand miles away. We can scan millions of books and make them widely accessible (while respecting the rights of publishers and authors). We can create an email system that gives away a gigabyte of storage (now over 7 gigs) at a time when all other services allow only a small fraction of that amount. We can instantly translate web pages from any of 51 languages. We can process search data to help public health agencies detect flu outbreaks much earlier. We can build a faster browser (Chrome), a better mobile operating system (Android), and an entirely new communications platform (Wave), and then open them up for the world to build upon, customize, and improve.
We can do these things because they are information problems and we have the computer scientists, technology, and computational power to solve them. When we do, we make numerous platforms – video, maps, mobile, PCs, voice, enterprise – better, more competitive, and more innovative. We are often attacked for being too big, but sometimes being bigger allows us to take on the impossible.
While getting more aggressive in their stated attidude, including probably worrying statements by their boss and others in regards to privacy, I believe Google still takes karma very seriously, open sourcing quite a bit of their projects, as well as providing transparency when it comes to certain areas evolving around user data. But indeed just “certain areas”, as we need to keep in mind that Google says “As a matter of policy, we don’t provide specifics on law enforcement requests to Google.” One case in 2009 saw an anonymous blogger being uncovered by Google after an opposing party sued and won. Technical faults in 2009 led to private data finding its way to the public, like when certain Google Docs cloud document were erronously shared with others. Google also rolled out behaviorial targeting for ads, and certain search personalization even when you’re logged out of your account. On Google-powered Chinese social site Laiba, the following words of warning, originally in Chinese, were printed below the comment box:
After posting, your IP address will be published by Tianya Laiba. Please note that, following Chinese law, Tianya Laiba is required to store the data of time and IP address of your entry for at least 60 days, and that on legal requests we offer this data to the government organization.
Google also continued to work with and against censorship around the world. On the one hand, they provide technology which includes censorship in countries like Germany and China. On the other hand, they’re providing many tools which increase information flow, and Google includes organizations like Reporters Without Borders in their charity plans. Now while Google is open-sourcing on the one side, they’re also very secretive when asked about specifics of their workings with governments of countries like China.
In the card game of revenues, some of Google’s jokers – their popular but still ad-free sites – were still kept in hand in 2009. I don’t yet see any ads in Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Talk or Google Translate, for instance. Other jokers were put on the table, like with the inclusion of advertisements in Google News. On the Google aquisition side for Google, there were the companies AdMob, Gizmo5, Teracent, ReCaptcha, AppJet and others. 2009 was also the year in which Google continued to tighten its connection with the US government, as their code entered areas of whitehouse.gov, and they promoted an Obama Time Capsule project on their image search homepage. (Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt, who previously had endorsed now US president Barack Obama, was appointed as member of Obama’s economic adviser team in 2008.)
Design-wise, Google’s switch to a minimalist-fade-in homepage was one of their more progressive and interesting moves of recent years. Not even their favicon remained the same this year. Result design changed, too, with an expandable options side bar connecting the user to features such as a Wonder Wheel. The result page is now also restricted to a certain width, and contains more padding than before. Instead of a plain URL we’ll now often see the navigational hierarchy. The results URL itself changed too, at least for some users for some time, using an anchor with dynamic in-page updates.
Google Street View, one of Google’s most interesting products to play around with, added several countries to its list: Canada, Czech Republic, UK, Netherlands, Portugal, Switzerland, and Taiwan. It also saw the addition of a more immersive full screen view feature, and navigation options based on 3D shapes overlaying the imagery. Some countries pose more troubles than others for Google; in Japan, imagery was required to be reshot using a lower camera angle, and authorities are also continuing to worry in Switzerland. Google Images in the meanwhile kept growing its options list, and you can now search pictures by color, restrict to a certain width and height, or find Creative Commons licensed content.
In 2009,
Pandora Glass Beads, Google killed off several products, like Google Catalog, Dodgeball, selling newspaper print ads, or Google Notebook. The Google SOAP API was finally shut down, following the notice years earlier. Niniane Wang – once pictured in an advertisement for Google which read “We’re privileged to have Niniane at Google, but we need more engineers like her” – quit Google this year; her social 3D world Lively was cancelled in 2008, just months after having been made available. Google China’s Kai-Fu Lee quit, too, as did Google Russia’s chief technology officer. Designer Doug Bowman, who also quit this year, said:
Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues,
Tiffany Diamond Earrings, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.
I’m not sure Google’s focus on algorithm can solve these kind of unhappy employees problems. But Google is trying, as the Wall Street Journal wrote:
[Google] recently began crunching data from employee reviews and promotion and pay histories in a mathematical formula Google says can identify which of its 20,000 employees are most likely to quit.
Google officials are reluctant to share details of the formula, which is still being tested. The inputs include information from surveys and peer reviews, and Google says the algorithm already has identified employees who felt underused, a key complaint among those who contemplate leaving.
And what were some of Google’s releases and new efforts in 2009? The competition wasn’t sleeping, as we can see with Microsoft’s search contender Bing,
Pandora Beads Günstig [Source, or Wolfram Alpha; the return of the butler to Ask’s UK site is almost certainly less noteworthy (and Yahoo continued to put a price tag on private user data, as internal documents revealed; search for “Basic subscriber records: approx. $20 for the first ID, $10 per ID thereafter”). Have a look at what Google came up with:
iGoogle Theme Maker: “Google has released a small tool that helps you create a theme for the custom iGoogle homepage.” Tool to Experiment With Google’s Ajax APIs: “Google released the AJAX API Playground, a kind of interactive learning-by-doing for things like the Google Maps API, their Search API, or their Visualization API” A Gmail Offline Mode: “Gears is the name of Google’s browser tool to help bring offline capabilities (among other things) to web apps. Now, Gmail support for Gears is being rolled out too, in the form of a Gmail Labs experiment.” Google Earth 5 Maps Oceans: “Google announced that the latest version of Google Earth maps the oceans in much more detail” Google News Gadget: “Google has released a wizard with which you can create a Google News headlines box” Google Latitude: “Google has released a new service called Latitude to share where you are and what you’re up to. This is available for certain phones, but it also runs as a gadget on iGoogle.” Google Books Mobile: “Google announced they launched a mobile version of Google Book Search” New Google Site to Share Money-Saving Tips: “Google offers a new Google Moderator-based application called Tip Jar. The purpose of the mostly green-color-themed site is for people to contribute money saving tips and tricks in areas like work, family, transit and more.” Google’s JavaScript/ Chrome Experiments Showcase: “Google at ChromeExperiments.com released a showcase site for JavaScript experiments especially aimed as promotion to demonstrate their own Chrome browser’s capabilities, but with many experiments working in other browsers like Firefox too.” Gmail Gets Undo Send feature: “When you now press Send on an email (say, something with the headline ’I am quitting my job!’ or so), you’ll be returned to your inbox, but above the messages you’ll see ’Your message has been sent. Undo ...’.” Google Docs Gets a Drawing Program “The Google Docs suite with its text, spreadsheets and presentation editors got a new tool: a vector drawing program.” Google’s Venture Capital Fund: “Google has started a venture capital fund called Google Ventures.” Google App Engine With Java: “So far, only Python was supported as programming language, but Google now announced support for Java as well” Similar Images,
Pandora Style Charms, and Google News Timeline: “Google released two experiments into their newly structured Google Labs: Similar Images, and Google News Timeline ... The one release, Similar Images, is a highly useful image comparison engine ... The other release is called Google News Timeline, and it’s again pretty useful. You enter a search query, like yahoo, and are then presented with a left-to-right chronology of events throughot the years” Google Profiles Onebox: “Google has started to roll out integration of Google Profiles into their main results.” Google O3D, a 3D Plug-In & Development Framework: “Google released O3D, a framework they describe as ’a new, shader-based, low-level graphics API for creating interactive 3D applications in a web browser’.” Google Analytics Data Export API: “Google’s web stats tracker Analytics now has a data export API; a JavaScript option is included.” Google’s Social News Gadget: “Google has an iGoogle gadget called ’What’s Popular’. If you subscribe to it and expand it on your personalized Google homepage, you’ll see a social news page not unlike sites like Digg or Reddit, with up and down vote arrows.” Google Toolbar Labs: “The Google Toolbar got its own Labs, at least for Internet Explorer. The special toolbars currently available for download are ’My Location’ which finds ’locally-relevant search results on Google when local information is available’ (among other things, as Google suggests)” New Google Site for Advertisers: “Once you’re ’Activating the YouTubers’ (that is, pay Google Inc money so you can advertise on YouTube) you could even sell ’a product with no utility at all’ (that is, a pet stick), Google argues in a new site directed at advertisers.” Google Public Data onebox: “Google has launched a new statistics answer feature in their search results, pulled from public data” Google Calendar Taks Live: “Just click on the link ’Tasks’ in the left hand, and to the right side, a widget appears.” Google Web Elements: “Google at today’s I/O developer conference announced Google Web Elements. Web Elements lets you simply paste a URL from a public Google spreadsheet, calendar, presentations and more, and then offers you some gadget code to paste into your site.” Google Squared Is Live: “[J]ust enter the name of a group of things, say, I entered comic book character. Google Squared then calculates for a bit, and presents you with a table of attributes. In the case of comic book characters, the automatically found columns were name, image, description, publisher, first appearance, and author.“ Google’s Page Speed Optimization Add-on: “Google has released a Firefox add-on called Page Speed. It integrates with another add-on, Firebug, and is aimed at web developers trying to make their pages faster.” Google Translator Toolkit: “Google Translator Toolkit is a new tool being launched today to help translators organize their work and benefit from shared translations, glossaries and translation memories” Google Fusion Tables: “The Google Labs have released a new tool called Fusion Tables. It lets you view, visualize, merge & discuss large tables of data. In the tables ############## right now, there’s data like baby names, or Academy Awards by country.” Google Wave: “Technically, Wave is sometimes a bit slow to load, but otherwise very impressive. On more of a non-technical side, we were wondering whether Wave trying to be everything at once is its upside or its downside.” YouTube Changes Channel Layout, Gets 48,000+ Comments: “A YouTube blog entry by a YouTube manager announcing the roll-out of a new channel design has so far received 48,668 comments, and growing. Looks like not everyone is happy (and it may or may not be that unhappy users are more vocal, too, right now).” Gmail With Drag & Drop: “[Y]ou can now drag a message by its left-hand grid, and move it into a label/ folder to the left side. Also, you can now re-arrange labels via drag & drop.” Google Announced Their Operating System: Chrome OS: “Google announced an open source OS called Google Chrome Operating System. Google’s aim seems to make this a lightweight operating system that has a browser running web apps at its core. Many web apps being Google’s of course, or at least, that’s most likely Google’s bet.” Google Calendar Labs Released: “Just like Gmail, Google’s Calendar app now also has a Labs section” Google Reader Adds More (Cluttering?) Social Features: “Google’s feed reader, Google Reader, added a couple of social options, but Google-watcher Ionut is not convinced” Google Chrome Themes ############## Live: “Listed on the page at the moment are the following 29 themes: Classic, Baseball, Brushed, Candy, Color Chips, Cork Board, Desktop, Dots, Earthy, Floral Blue, ...” Google Chrome Syncing Starts: “Google is blurring the line between their desktop programs and web apps with the latest Chrome developer channel release: it brings bookmark syncing to their browser, and bookmarks will be accessible in the Google Docs app.” Google Health Onebox: “Google is now showing a special direct result in US searches for certain health-related topics. Enter asthma, for instance, and a box appears with pointers to Google Health and others” Google Docs Now With Translation Feature: “Just pick Tools -> Translate document, and then a language (like Chinese, German, English, Italian, Japanese, and many others). A new window will open showing you the automatic translation, and if you like it you can then choose to create a new document based on this translation, or have the old document be replaced with it.” Google Internet Stats: “Google Internet Stats is a small site (with a UK focus) collecting statistics about the internet from a variety of sources.” QUERY Function for Google Spreadsheets: “This function allows SQL-like queries using the Gviz syntax” Google Displaying Anchor Jump Links in Snippets: “Many pages on the web are divided into named sections which can be linked to like #this. Google is now showing direct links to those anchors sometimes.” Google Fast Flip Lets You Quickly Browse News Pages: “Google’s latest Labs experiment is called Fast Flip. Opening the site you’ll be presented with snapshot images of articles from lots of different news sites. You can then scroll through these snapshots or click on any snapshot to be taken to a larger, readable image of that article.” Google’s Data Liberation Site: “Google is emphasizing their proclaimed goal to let you easily import and export your Google data when moving services via a new site – DataLiberation.org” Google Chrome Frame: “Oh sweet: Google released a plug-in for Internet Explorer which brings Canvas and a couple of other things (like Chrome’s fast JavaScript engine) to Internet Explorer.” Google Sidewiki: “Google Sidewiki is an app you can install for Firefox and Internet Explorer as part of the Google Toolbar. It lets you discuss any webpage out there with others – by adding messages in a side bar displayed on a given page.” Google Trends Onebox: “Google added a onebox to their results, showing the search popularity of your query if it’s in the current top 100 (and if you’re searching from Japan or the US).” Google Widget to Let Your Visitors Translate Your Page: “Google released a new translation gadget. Drop the small HTML snippet on your page, and your visitors will then see a bit of interface pop up allowing them to instantly translate the current page’s text into another language.” New Google Search Options: “Google added the following to their search options side bar ... ’Visited pages’ vs ’Not yet visited’ ... ’Fewer shopping sites’ vs ’More shopping sites’ ... Blogs” Function to Translate Google Spreadsheet Cells: “Google Spreadsheets has two new functions. One will let you auto-translate the contents of a cell ... The other new function is DetectLanguage, telling you which language a given text has.” Google Cloudboard, a Tested Server-side Clipboard: “Last week, Google Operating System reported about traces of a currently internally tested Google clipboard of sorts called Cloudboard ... Of related cross-integration interest over at Ionut’s blog is Google OnePick, a document picker across different Google apps as part of Google Sites.” Google Building Maker: “Google released Building Maker, a tool that lets you help their Google Earth/ Google Maps/ SketchUp suite of apps by creating 3D building data for them.” Google Webmaster Tools Labs: “Google’s webmaster tool set added 2 features in a new Labs category. One is a ’Malware details’ page for your site (if all is good, it will be pretty much blank). The other is ’Fetch as Googlebot’, which shows you the fetched HTML and HTTP header status for a given URL on your site” Smarter Google Analytics to Track Significant Traffic Changes: “[Y]ou can instruct Analytics to send you alert emails upon certain traffic changes” Google Social Search Live: “Google now lets you opt in to the Social Search feature” New Google Music Onebox Lets US Users Play Music: “Clicking a link from the top music selection opens up a small player device hosted at lala.com.” Google Maps Navigation for USA: “Verizon Droid phones in the US can now access Google Maps Navigation, ’an internet-connected GPS navigation system with voice guidance’, as Google says.” Google Related Links (Yet again): “Google once had a program called Related Links, started in 2006 and then cancelled in 2007 (see an older screenshot). Now they’re reviving the name with a new Google Labs experiment.” Google Commerce Search: “If you’re running an online shop, Google’s new Commerce Search may be worth having a look at.” Check What Google Knows About You With Google Dashboard: “When you’re at Google and switch to Settings ? Google account settings you may now ... see a link to Google Dashboard reading ’View data stored with this account’.” Google Closure, JavaScript Tools & Library: “Google released a couple of internal tools of theirs into the open source world (must be make-people-happy week in Mountain View).” Go, a Programming Language by Google: “Google has released a new programming language called Go. Google wants to offer a couple of benefits from their language: fast compilation, easy analyzing of dependencies, static types that nevertheless feel more lightweight compared to some other languages, and multi-core machine support.” Google Latitude History and Alerts: “Google’s human location tracking service Latitude has received two new features: a history (i.e. a route of where you’ve been), and a ’friend is nearby’ type of alert functionality.” Locking SafeSearch: “Google has added a ’Lock SafeSearch’ feature, available via their search preferences page. It’s meant for concerned adults who don’t want kids to switch away from the SafeSearch filtering” Google SPDY Protocol Aims to Make Web Pages Load Faster: “Google has released experimental work of a protocol that tries to speed up the web. It’s called SPDY, prononunced ’speedy’.” Explore Similar Images with Google Image Swirl: “Google has released an interactive similar images explorer. The app is called Google Image Swirl, and it’s using the wonder wheel Flash visualization you might know from web search results.” View Your iGoogle Gadget Stats in One Place: “Google released a Gadget Dashboard for iGoogle gadget developers. On this page,
Tiffany Co Rings, you can add gadget of yours by URL ... and then see weekly stats, your gadget ratings and more.” Google’s Fade-In Homepage Now Official: “This might surprise you, but Google has made their ’fade-in’ homepage variant ... their official homepage design now” New Google Analytics Snippet Aims to Reduce Page Load Time: “Google released a new alternate Analytics snippet. Google writes that ’Unlike a traditional installation, asynchronous tracking optimizes how browsers load ga.js so its impact on user experience is minimized ...’” Google Tracks & Personalizes Even When You’re Signed-Out: “Google say they now start to track your search, using a cookie, even when you’re signed out. This allows them to deliver personalized results based on your other searches of the past 180 days.” Google’s DNS Resolution Service: “Google Public DNS ’is a free, global Domain Name System (DNS) resolution service, that you can use as an alternative to your current DNS provider,’ Google announced” Google’s Site Performance Tool: The Google Webmaster Tools now include a site speed testing tool. You can find it at Labs → Site performance.” Auto-Translated Search: “For instance, search for restaurant reviews antwerp, then click Show Options → Translated search. Google will automatically try to determine which languages are most relevant for your query to be translated into, and present results for those queries translated back again.” Google Real-Time Search Results: “Google has released real-time results integrated into their main web search results. Now, when you enter a query like obama, google and many others, somewhere in the page you might be seeing a dynamically self-updating,
Pandora Bracelet, scrollable section of bits currently posted over the web. Sources include partners on this like Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, as well as general news sites.” Google Maps on Android Shows What’s Nearby: “Now, you can ’long-press on the map, tap on the bubble, and look for ’What’s nearby?’ in the menu.’ According to Google, you will then find 10 closest places such as ’restaurants, shops and other points of interest’.” Google Goggles: “Google launched Goggles, an Android phones application which lets you snap a photo somewhere, to then get more information about the contents of the photo.” Google Chrome for Linux & Mac, Chrome Extensions: “The Google Chrome browser is now also available for Mac ... and Linux ... Also, Google now released extensions for Chrome.” Google’s “Living Stories” News Experiment: “Google has partnered with the New York Times and the Washington Post news organizations to create an experimental type of news page they call ’living story’.” Music Videos at Vevo, With Some Google Help: “Music video site Vevo has launched in the US and Canada, geoblocked in other countries.” Direct (and Visual) Answers in Google’s Auto-Completion Box: “Google has started to offer certain onebox features or special results – like Google Q&A or the Google Calculator – right within the auto-completion box on the homepage.” A Google Phone Called Nexus One? “Google has given a new Google phone to its employees. It’s apparently called Nexus One” Goo.gl: “Google has released a URL shortener for their Toolbar and other services at goo.gl” Google Tool to Check How Much of a Page Appears in Typical Browsers: “The Google Labs feature a new little tool called Google Browser Size. It just visualizes roughly how much of a page typical users (or more specifically, the users of Google) will actually see without scrolling.”
Google in late 2009 is now covering or aiming to cover web apps, the browser that runs the web apps, the OS that runs the browser, and, according to rumors, even the computer that runs the OS. The ads distribution chain is getting more complete – which is good for Google as long as they’re not stopped by the legal actions of a government – because in the main part their business consists of selling your attention to advertisers, so that these advertisers can get their ad message to you to sell more products. Also, Google gets more and more ways to cross-connect their products; they can push their search in their browser, they can push Docs in Gmail, they can push their browser in their OS, they can push Google Health in web search, and so on.
“It is harder and harder for me to spot an IT sector in which Google does not offer products and services,” Mathias Schindler pondered in the forum, “Can you think of any IT sector where there is no Google product (yet)?” Competition has a tough time, unless they happen to get bought up by Google, not only because of Google’s cross-integration power, but also because it would take mindblowing budget to reproduce Google’s cloud server farm. Google after all arguably owns the world’s biggest super computer, one with an AI that becomes better and better with more data. But the giant is growing taller by the second, and I’m curious if there will be a couple of instances where we’ll see him stumble over his own feet in 2010.
[Thanks to everyone who got involved here in 2009!]
Looking Back again at Google in ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (6)
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