wavelinks

Official Google Blog: Teaching computers to read: Google acquires reCAPTCHA

The image above is a CAPTCHA — you can read it, but computers have a harder time interpreting the letters. We tried to make it hard for computers to recognize because we wanted to give humans the scoop first, but we’re happy to announce to everybody now that Google has acquired reCAPTCHA, a company that provides CAPTCHAs to help protect more than 100,000 websites from spam and fraud.

Since computers have trouble reading squiggly words like these, CAPTCHAs are designed to allow humans in but prevent malicious programs from scalping tickets or obtain millions of email accounts for spamming. But there’s a twist — the words in many of the CAPTCHAs provided by reCAPTCHA come from scanned archival newspapers and old books. Computers find it hard to recognize these words because the ink and paper have degraded over time, but by typing them in as a CAPTCHA, crowds teach computers to read the scanned text.

via Official Google Blog: Teaching computers to read: Google acquires reCAPTCHA.

Google Fast Flip

[Honey I froze the web] Google Fast Flip is a web application that lets users discover and share news articles. It combines qualities of print and the Web, with the ability to “flip” through pages online as quickly as flipping through a magazine. It also enables users to follow friends and topics, discover new content and create their own custom magazines around searches.

via Features : Google Fast Flip – Google News Help.

Google bigotry « BuzzMachine

Google has an image problem – not a PR problem (that is, not with the public) but a press problem (with whining old media people). Google is trying hard – too hard, perhaps – not to argue with the guys who still buy ink by the barrel. Google is only causing them to buy fewer barrels. And newspaper people will use their last drops of ink to complain about Google’s success and try to blame it for their own failures rather than changing their own businesses.

What should Google do? I think it needs to become news’ best friend.

via Google bigotry « BuzzMachine.

Official Google Blog: Google Domestic Trends: tracking economic sectors

Google Domestic Trends tracks Google search traffic across specific sectors of the economy. The changes in the search volume of a given sector on google.com may provide useful economic insight. We’ve created 23 indexes that track the major economic sectors, such as retail, auto and unemployment.

For example, the Google Luxuries Index tracks queries like [jewelry], [rings], [diamond], [ring], [jewelers], [tiffany] and so forth. As you can see from the screenshot below, this index has seasonal spikes in December — however, in the last two years there has been a pronounced decrease as the recession made consumers wary of spending on luxury items.

via Official Google Blog: Google Domestic Trends: tracking economic sectors.

Google Improves AdSense Competitive Ad Filter | jatiN mahindrA doT coM

In August, Google announced that it was upgrading its category filtering feature for AdSense, and extending the feature into more countries (like the US and the UK). Today, Google announced that they have added two additional improvements to the Competitive Ad Filter.

These improvements would be faster filtering and increased filter size.

“In the past, the Competitive Ad Filter sometimes took up to several hours to block URLs you’d entered,” says Arlene Lee of Google’s Inside AdSense Team. “Knowing you’ve wanted a faster filtering system, we’re excited to let you know that URLs added to your Competitive Ad Filter are now usually blocked within 30 minutes. We hope that this will help you quickly make changes to maintain a positive user experience on your sites.”

via Google Improves AdSense Competitive Ad Filter | jatiN mahindrA doT coM.

Hey , Google , get off o’ my cloud

As they tend to do with everything else Google are maintaining a strong presence in the growing market for providing key business software and infrastructure as a service.

Just this month they have elevated their ready-to-use cloud computing product ‘Google Apps’ from beta status sending out a clear signal that this is no longer seen as ‘experimental’ and confers it status as a product in its own right.

Google Apps is a web accessible platform that provides storage and functionality to a business to run a mail server and office documentation editing capability. It’s really made up of three elements: Gmail with domain personalisation, Google Docs and Google Sites.

via Hey , Google , get off o’ my cloud . » Via Consulting.

Official Google Blog: Google Translate now speaks 51 languages

We spend a lot of time thinking about how information travels around the globe. After all, there are Googlers living and working in dozens of countries — and we’re pretty sure our products are used in many more. So we’re familiar with the need to translate information across borders, and we’ve been working hard to build the technology to enable you to do just that. Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve added nine new languages to Google Translate: Afrikaans, Belarusian, Icelandic, Irish, Macedonian, Malay, Swahili, Welsh and Yiddish. That means that Google Translate now supports 51 languages and 2550 language pairs — including all 23 official EU languages.

via Official Google Blog: Google Translate now speaks 51 languages.

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Google Docs: now with translation

To make sharing content easier, Google just added the ability to translate documents into Google Docs

via Official Google Enterprise Blog: Google Docs: now with translation.

Google Reinvents Email, Docs with ‘Google Wave’

[www.pcmag.com] What would e-mail look like if it were invented today, rather than several years ago? Meet Google Wave, a preview application shown off Thursday at the Google I/O conference.

The Google Wave site is now up and running, although access to the application will be restricted. Google Wave was developed by the Google Maps team, led by Lars Rasmussen and his brother Jens.

“One of the best times of my life was in 2005, just after the launch of Google Maps, when developers started doing crazy things with the APIs,” Rasmussen said, adding that he hopes developers will do the same with Wave.
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[latimes.com] Google presented a private demonstration of its much-anticipated collaboration tool, Google Wave, this morning. Even after watching all of the videos and talking to the developers, the
first thing that struck us is how rough it is around the edges.

To be fair, Google calls it a developer preview, meaning it’s not meant for the prying eyes of the average user or critical journalist. Yet, the Times got an invitation anyway.

First, the good news: Wave has a lot going for it. Its function for letting users watch as you type each letter is punchy, just like it was in the demo, and works surprisingly well. At first, it feels sort of strange exposing your own typing habits and witnessing others’. But it really speeds conversations along.
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[arstechnica.com] Google is looking to change the way we use the Internet to communicate with a new service that it calls Google Wave. Wave was previewed Thursday during the Google I/O conference as a way to combine e-mail, chat, photos, feeds from around the Web, and more in a collaborative environment. The project is not only cool-sounding, it’s also quite ambitious, and Google hopes it will eventually replace some of our uses for e-mail.

In a post to the Official Google Blog, Google Software Engineering Manager Lars Rasmussen discussed the evolution of Wave after he and his brother Jens joined Google. According to Rasmussen, too much of our Internet communication was created out of imitation of a real-life form (e-mail, live chat, document sharing), and as a result, it had become too segmented when it didn’t have to be. “What if we tried designing a communications system that took advantage of computers’ current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms?”
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