Website Technology Point » Google

Google Chrome Extension “Linky” Opens Multiple Links

webtech — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 04:43:37 +0000

Here is a good extension of Google Chrome users called Linky.

Linky opens all selected links that are currently hightlighted in new tabs. Makes it easier to scan through many pages quickly.

Select an area of text which contains links, and clicking on the linky icon from the chrome extension bar will open each link in a separate tab.

Here is a video Demonstration:

Read More: Linky

Google Ads Favicon Support for Subscriptions in Google Reader

webtech — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 03:58:43 +0000

Google Reader gets favicon support for subscriptions. These are the little square icons provided by sites that show up both in your address bar and open tabs (atleast in most browsers).

One advantage of favicon support is that, simplifying the feed reading process, since you can now find a particular feed in a long list of sites without even looking at the names.

But for those who are not interested in this feature, so Google made it into a setting that you can access from your subscriptions menu.

Read More: Google Blog

Offline Gmail Can Now Send Attachments

webtech — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 03:43:28 +0000

Gmail users who had been waiting for attachments in messages composed while offline in Gmail, can now do that. Google has introduced this feature.

Attachments work just the wya you would expect them to whether you are online or offline (with the exception that when you’re offline you won’t be able to include inline images). Just add the attachment and send your message.

For those who has not yet tried offline access, then just go to “Labs tab” and get started by doing the following:

1. Select Enable next to Offline Gmail.
2. Click Save Changes.
3. After your browser reloads, you’ll see a new “Offline” link in the upper righthand corner of the Gmail page, next to your username. Click this link to start the offline set up process and download Gears if you don’t already have it.

Read More: Gmail Blog

Google Wave Crawling In Net

webtech — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 01:30:01 +0000

As with any so called revolutionary technology, initially, there is always a great divide between those who become early adopters/proponents and those that remain on the sidelines watching skeptically. Google Wave is currently in that position. Since the time Google sent out its first batch of invites, people have been trying to evaluate whether it’s just a cool gimmick or does it have any value. For those who came in late, Google Wave is a real time collaborative tool that purges the line between instant messaging, email, collaborative tools, wikis and social media.

If you have the patience, you may want to watch Google’s really long video (1hr 20 min) on the official site. In a nutshell, Wave is a power packed set of tools for creation. It allows you to create dynamic ‘waves’ (wiki-like documents) in which you can invite people to have conversations and collaboratively create, brainstorm, share pictures, videos, while even taking polls on topics of debate, among other things. It allows for rich text and the best feature is the ability to annotate any part of the wave with comments.

People on the wave can reply to the comments and participants can view what is being typed ‘in real time’- as its being written. If you were invited to the wave at a later stage of development, you can even rewind and play back the events. So in a way, wave creates feature-rich conversations that can be searched, revised, discussed and finally the end result after refinement can be used. All this is just the tip of the iceberg. Wave is essentially a platform on which developers can create either robots or extensions to perform certain tasks, taking Wave’s functionality to a new level. For instance, there is a robot called Rosy that translates text in real time and there’s a gadget that can create real time polls that can be embedded into a wave. All of this sounds really exciting, so what’s the catch?

Apparently none, apart from a few bugs. It’s just that people are having a hard time evaluating whether it’s only ‘fun’ or it can be used for enterprise level work. And what is this ‘work’ it can be put to. There is also speculation of whether this will be just another communication tool that needs your constant attention while operating in the already cluttered space of blogs, email, IMs, social networks and Twitter. Will Wave do away with all of those? In our opinion- not yet. But it will certainly reduce clutter. If you’re used to working in teams, you’ll relate to the confusing caused when on mail is marked to several people who reply independently.

Even with how well Gmail conversations are organized you will find mails, overlapping and then finally one person in the work group will be assigned the taks of extracting the relevant points from all the mails and put them in a document. Google Wave makes all this redundant as whatever common objective you’re discussing or ideating over, gets commented upon and refined then and there.

Some early users are finding the learning curve a bit problematic. Here again, the perception has more to with the generation divide. Most users who have grown using social media tools as their primary means of communication will find the interface intuitive. While the older timers who can’t get around the fact that “this doesn’t look like Outlook”, will definitely have a touch time. The bottom line is that once the platform is made public (even in Google’s forever-beta style), people will find ways to make it work for them. We’re eagerly waiting for our invite and Google has assured to include us in the next round of invites.

Article from Digit magazine.

Google Introduces Machine-generated Automatic Captions In YouTube

webtech — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 01:31:50 +0000

As more people are making use of captions, Google has added automatic captions in YouTube. Captions not only help the deaf and hearing imparied, but with machine translation, they also enable people around the world to access video content in any of 51 languages.

Captions can also improve search and even enable users to jump to the exact parts of the videos they’re looking for.

According to Google Blog: Google has combined Google’s automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions, or auto-caps for short. Auto-caps use the same voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice to automatically generate captions for video. The captions will not always be perfect (check out the video below for an amusing example), but even when they’re off, they can still be helpful—and the technology will continue to improve with time.

Apart from that automatic caption timing is launching or in other words auto-timing, to make it significantly easier to create captions manually. With auto-timing, you no longer need to have special expertise to create your own captions in YouTube. All you need to do is create a simple text file with all the words in the video and we’ll use Google’s ASR technology to figure out when the words are spoken and create captions for your video. This should significantly lower the barriers for video owners who want to add captions, but who don’t have the time or resources to create professional caption tracks.

Here is Video Demonstration:

Read More: Google Blog

New Features In Google Translate With New Look

webtech — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:10:50 +0000

Google Translate gets new features along with new looks and feel.

New Features Include:

Translate instantly: Say goodbye to the old “Translate” button. Google Translate now translates your text right as you type.

Read and write any language: Want to say “Today is a good day” in Chinese, but can’t read Han characters? Click “Show romanization” to read the text written phonetically in English. Right now, this works for all non-Roman languages except for Hebrew, Arabic and Persian. Also there is a new input transliteration feature for Arabic, Persian or Hindi. If you want to translate from one of these languages, but can’t type the script on your keyboard, google’s input transliteration feature will allow you to type words as they sound and convert them to native script.

Text-to-speech: When translating into English, you can now also hear translations in spoken form by clicking the Speaker Icon.

Here is video Demonstration:

Read More: Google Blog

Google Launches Google Image Swirl

webtech — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:12:56 +0000

Google Image Swirl builds on new computer vision research to cluster similar images into representative groups in a fun, exploratory interface.

If you search for an image in Image Swirl, you’ll find 12 images in thumbnails view close to what you search and when you click on the thumbnail image, then cluster of images will “swirl” into view.

You can then further explore additional sub-groups within any cluster. The interface may look familiar to those of you who have tried Google’s Wonder Wheel available in the Search Options panel, which enables you to explore related search queries.

Each thumbnail on the initial results page represents an algorithmically-determined representative group of images with similar appearance and meaning. These aren’t just the most relevant images — they are the most relevant groups of images.

Image Swirl currently works for more than 200,000 queries, but Google Labs plans to include more queries in the future.

Read More: Google Blog

Google Introduces Parental Controlled SafeSearch Filtering

webtech — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:22:42 +0000

Parent’s want to be extremely careful when their child is browsing on the web and specially in the house. Google introduces SafeSearch screens for sites that contain explicit sexual content and deletes them from your search results.

Although most of the site filtering doesn’t guarantee full protection, by this one from Google it’s harder for kids to break in. The parent will have to log into his or her Google account and enter a password. Once the settings have been changed, the Google search will change in appearance to indicate that it’s locked. The new page will have large balls in the righ corner so that parents can see from across the room that their kids are on the safe search page.

You can choose from among three SafeSearch settings:

Moderate filtering excludes most explicit images from Google Image Search results but doesn’t filter ordinary web search results. This is your default SafeSearch setting; you’ll receive moderate filtering unless you change it.
Strict filtering applies SafeSearch filtering to all your search results (i.e. both image search and ordinary web search).
No filtering, as you’ve probably figured out, turns off SafeSearch filtering completely.

Read More: SafeSearch Filtering

Google Introduces Quick Viewing Of Formatted PDFs In Search Results

webtech — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 12:51:45 +0000

Previously you must have found it difficult to view the PDF files only if you have a PDF viewer. But google has introduced quick viewing of formateed PDFs in you search results.
Before Google had provided an alternative to quickly and easily view these files as HTML right in a web browser by clicking “”View as HTML”, although you missed graphics, tables, fonts and other such elements, but still you could view the text properly.

But now Google has added new links to “Quick View” PDFs in your browser with the formatting intact. The new links are based on the same technology that’s available in Google Docs and Gmail, as well as to webmasters through the Google Docs viewer. We’ve been rolling this technology out to the search results page since July, and as of today we’ve added “Quick View” links to more than 50% of the PDFs in our index. The new links appear at the end of the second line of the result, right underneath the title.

Now you have all the graphics, tables, fonts intact along with the text.

Read More: Google Blog

Google Wave With 100,000 Invitations For Developers, First Users And Select Customers

webtech — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 17:11:15 +0000

On 30th September Google will be sending more than 100,000 invitations to preview Google Wave for developers, First users and select customers.

Google Wave has the potential for making you more productive when communicating and collaborating, according to Google Blog.

Google Wave is a lot more useful if your friends, family and colleagues have it too.

Read More: Google Blog