Google Reader gets Search

That’s right, search is finally in Google Reader. Now you can find that that apricot recipe you came across a few months ago and now have a craving for. Or perhaps you’d like to search for “ipod” so that you can read at once all the posts in your subscriptions that mention today’s announcements.

Search lets you use keywords to find items in your subscriptions (if you’re looking to search all blogs, give Blog Search a try). If you subscribe to someone’s shared items, it’ll search those too. This handy feature is brought to you especially by Ben and Chris’s tireless engineering work and Jenna’s relentless iteration on user interface concepts.

Along for the ride in the search release are a few other Reader tweaks. You can now hide the side navigation by clicking on the separator to its right. Unread counts now go to 1,000, so that you can know just how far behind you are when you come back from vacation. Finally, Reader now behaves like every other web page and lets you use the forward and back buttons to move between folders and subscriptions that you’ve navigated to.

If you’d like to let us know how search is working out for you, or have any other Reader feedback, you can use our shiny new forums to get in touch.

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Evidence of GDrive in Google Apps

Rumors of an online storage solution from Google have been circulating for years. These rumors became stronger in July last year when references to Platypus and GDrive were accidentally made available on the writely.com domain. A few months later, Google’s internal Platypus client was leaked and people started to question whether GDrive would ever be made available publicly – especially when it was suggested recently that the GDrive release may have been delayed or canceled.

Earlier today, I stumbled across some more evidence which may further support rumors that GDrive will be made available publicly, possibly as part of Google Apps, though it could just mean that Google uses GDrive internally as part of Google Apps.

Anyone familiar with my previous Google-digging will know that I try to keep track of Google service names used by both Google Accounts and Google Apps. By changing query string parameters on various pages, it’s possible to get a glimpse into what Google might be working on. Many of the service code names I’ve discovered in the past have been released several months or years later, while others are still unreleased or remain to be a complete mystery.

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Google Gains More Power

Some popular news agencies, like the Associated Press, now require Google to link to them directly (and pay a fee). That’s just fine with Google, but it’s bad news for the newspaper industry in general.

Google isn’t big enough. Right. So, now the dingbats who run some of the big news services are making it bigger. How? Well, they reckon it’s okay to make Google “take” their feeds rather than link to their very own customers, thus screwing those customers and further benefiting Google.

Let me try to explain

The Google News site robotically scans hundreds of news sources and provides a faux front page of popular news items, with hundreds, if not thousands, of redundant links to those stories (as they are carried by local news outlets). Google links to these outlets, and this is where the reader then goes to read the story. If the story is from the Associated Press , then the local outlet pays the AP for the content.

Until now

The AP, among others, saw this as some sort of vague copyright violation. It demanded that Google pay a license fee and link to the story directly from the Google site. So, Google said okay. Now, the newspapers—who collectively “own” the AP—lose a link and a potential long-term customer.

So can someone explain to me why the newspapers would stand by and let this happen? No wonder they’re dying. They’re run by idiots. The newspapers obviously encouraged the AP and others to do this, or they would have squawked when the idea came up.

The other three organizations that now require Google to take out a license and keep the content on the Google site are Agence France-Presse, the Press Association in the United Kingdom, and the Canadian Press. The argument is that Google is somehow violating their copyrights by running the short summaries, despite the fact that many of these summaries are voluntarily thrown into the public domain by RSS feeds and other mechanisms and should be considered fair use anyway.

Since paying the licensing fees is cheaper than a legal battle, Google took the easy way out. The bonus for Google is that it gets even more page views and people stay on the site longer. The old way Google was handling the news was actually doing the varied news outlets a favor. But, hey, no favor goes unpunished.

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Coming Soon to a Google Apps Near You: Wikis

It looks like Google will shortly be adding a wiki to their web office application suite. Google acquired JotSpot, a provider of hosted wikis, last October, and signs now point to a re-launch of the service as Google Wiki. Google Blogoscoped noticed that “jotspot” is now a Google Apps service code, and if you try to log in to the service you’re treated with a rather poorly-sized Google Wiki logo.

Google said in July that it would be adding JotSpot to Google Apps, so this doesn’t come as much of a surprise. The Google Operating System blog speculates that the launch will be timed with an announcement at this weekend’s Office 2.0 event in San Francisco.

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Edit iGoogle Layout

iGoogle now allows users to choose different layout for their tabs, by the number and size of the columns. To edit your tab, just click on “Edit this tab” under the arrow next to the tab name.

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Introducing the Google Phone

The Internet is buzzing about it, but only a privileged few know what it looks like, what it will do, or when it will hit the streets.

Cambridge has a chocolate factory, and a Willy Wonka. The chocolate factory is Google’s local research lab, located on the seventh floor of a Kendall Square office tower, and the resident Wonka is Rich Miner, a Google executive sometimes described as the company’s vice president of wireless but officially a “technical staff member,” according to a Google spokesman.

The golden ticket is a chance to see a prototype of Google’s new mobile phone, which Miner has shown to a handful of Boston entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, some of whom have signed nondisclosure agreements and some of whom haven’t.

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Google Updates Desktop for Mac

Google Desktop for the Macintosh has added support for nine additional languages in its most recent update. The announcement comes in a posting on Google’s Official Mac Blog.

Google Desktop for Mac, which remains available as a public beta test, enables Mac users to search for content on their computers the same way they use Google to search for content on the Internet. It also searches GMail accounts and Web browser history. It can create cached copies — or snapshots — of files and other items each time you view them, to provide file version control.

Languages now supported by Google Desktop for the Mac include Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Dutch, English (UK), French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish.

According to the release notes, the new release of Google Desktop for the Mac also adds a crash reporter, supports the ability to ignore spam in Apple Mail and Microsoft Entourage, supports contact groups in Address Book and Entourage, and splits its kernel extension into two parts to avoid future reboots on Tiger. The software also has seen a variety of bug fixes.

Google acquires online word processor

Raid – the new war cry

The great war between Google versus Microsoft versus Yahoo. Actually for the past few months its only been Microsoft versus Google, Yahoo has been rather silent. The war is on General Ballmer and General Page are spending considerable resources on drawing war plans. If acquisition was the driving plan two years ago, this year ‘poaching’ is the central theme of the war plan. Microsoft trying to poach into the world of Google’s search. Now Google has hit back in a manner which could hurt Microsoft rather badly in times to come.

Microsoft’s envy, Google’s pride – The brand new acquisition of Google

Google yesterday said that it had bought the Silicon Valley start-up Upstartle, gaining its Writely Internet word processing software. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. The application allows users to write and share documents through a web browser rather than with software on their computer. As a result, files can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection. Upstartle released a test version of Writely software last August. Upstartle has four employees, according to the company’s Web site.

War – Google style

Last week on Google’s starting a Payment service on Google base, a direct threat to eBay and Paypal I had written “a bang without even a whisper”. This week Google does it again. Google and the art of subtlety. Such an important event, a challenge right in the heart of the world’s biggest empire, Microsoft. Yet officially Google makes it sound as if this means nothing. The official Google Blog has the picture of a pug as the main post. Posted by Nickey from Canine Division titled as Pug-speak it says “Unlike some others, I may be a small dog, but size is just a state of mind: My Google job is as important as anyone else’s. After my morning nap at the office, I go out on hall monitor duty.”

The 2nd post has a rather important announcement, important to the rest of the world atleast. Written in exactly thirteen lines it starts with “For the last five months, I’ve been part of a Silicon Valley startup called Upstartle, which makes Writely, a collaborative word processor that runs in a web browser. Well, as of Monday, I’m happy to say that I, and the rest of the Writely team, are now part of Google.”

Writely said Google and the art of subtlety.

The importance of Writely

Although Writely has only a few thousand test users, analysts believe Google’s move presents a challenge to Microsoft’s desk-bound software. There has been speculation Microsoft is planning an online version of its Office products. Google is trying to move as much of your work as possible online, away from the Microsoft Windows environment. The acquisition puts Google in direct competition with Word software from Microsoft and signals the intention of Google to expand its reach into Microsoft products. While Microsoft is already testing small-business software that is delivered over the Internet, the company is not offering word processing software that is delivered using the Web.

Is Google planning to replace Microsoft Office

Microsoft still is the leader in the word processing arena. Infact it is almost the standard software for word processing, presentation and spread sheets. Google and Microsoft have been at war for almost 3 years now. The earlier strategy was focused on acquisitions. That’s changed lately. Microsoft is trying its best to dampen the prospects of Google by entering the search arena. Google is trying to get into the Microsoft space.

Writely is important because it allows users to write and share documents through a web browser rather than with software on their computer. As a result, files can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection. This is almost a direct challenge to the new version of Microsoft Office.

The Google Performance

Every application of Google is almost a piece of art. Unlike its giant competitor Google applications have always been low on resource consumption. Their functionality have been super setting standards unknown to the industry before. Whether Google has exploited AJAX for some of its most eye-popping services such as GMail and Google Maps isn’t really important to the user. What matters is functionality and the delivery factor of Google is super. The fact remains that Microsoft with all the resources at its helm hasn’t been able to measure up to those standards. I sometimes wonder with a Gmail around how does Microsoft really feel about having a service like Hotmail in this age and time.

The next step of Google

There have been rumors about Google building an operating system, about Google global hard drive project. My guess is the next show from Google would be the latter, the server based hard drive, accessible to the user anywhere around the world on any PC with a net connection. The equation is simple.

Writely allows users to write and share documents through a web browser rather than with software on their computer. As a result, files can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection.

Gmail is already more than 2.5 gb and lets you access emails and attachments globally.

So add it up. Office documents + Files + Emails = Globally available at any computer anywhere with an internet connection. So my guess is a Google global hard drive should be coming soon.

Well done Google. The war been Microsoft and Google is getting interesting. Let’s see who acquires or poaches what in the coming weeks. Trust me to keep you informed.

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Google Earth Flight Simulator

Some time last week, Google expanded Google Earth with Google Sky. As fascinating as Google Sky is, that’s not the focus of this post. Along with the latest update comes a hidden feature of which I cannot seem to find any other information about. It’s not in the release notes and a search on Google produces no results. Seems Google have done one of their unpublicized updates they’re becoming well-known for.

What I’m talking about is a flight simulator embedded within GE. Sounds awesome, doesn’t it? If the thought amazes you as much as it did me, then you might have run off and tried it for yourself. But there’s a problem. Remember what I said above – it’s a hidden feature!

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Blogger and malware

You may have seen stories in the news recently about malware on Blogger, such has this one from the BBC or this one from Committee to Protect Bloggers. Blogger was not compromised. Instead, the blog posts are from users whose machines were compromised by a virus. These users had their mail2blogger addresses in their computers’ address books (a perfectly legitimate use case), which the virus then spammed with its content.

We are in the process of notifying impacted users and recommending that they scan their computers and run current anti-virus software, available in the Google Pack. This is also good advice for all users, especially those who may have clicked the links in the emails sent by the virus. For more information about computer security, check out upenn.edu and us-cert.gov.