Entries from June 2008 ↓

The philosophy for the Google Talk team is to enable real time communication where and how people need it, across different platforms, devices, and operating systems. Towards these goals, we have made Google Talk available through web interfaces like Gmail chat and the Google Talk gadget, as well as directly from the desktop through our own downloadable client and via many XMPP clients. We have faced some challenges in keeping the capabilities for each of these versions of Google Talk up to date, and we have heard your feedback on striving towards more feature parity across all versions.

While recently we have spent more time on web integration scenarios, we have also been developing a new client that allows our downloadable and web versions of Google Talk to move forward together more quickly. The Google Talk, Labs Edition release is a sneak peek into this work. Of note in this Labs Edition release is its use of the open source Webkit engine to host the Google Talk gadget. We’ve used Webkit to bring the Talk gadget out of your browser, and onto your desktop, able to run in the Taskbar. Google Talk, Labs Edition combines “downloadable client behavior”, like stacking notifications and displaying presence outside the browser, with nearly all of the web behaviors of the Google Talk gadget, such as emoticons, multi-user chat, tabbed conversations, etc. It can also natively display web notifications from multiple sources, such as Gmail and calendar alerts and Orkut scrap changes. A few weeks ago we added invisible mode to the Google Talk Gadget, and this functionality immediately extended to Google Talk Labs Edition.

Google Talk, Labs Edition is a first step towards a more unified experience whether you’re using Talk through the web or on the desktop. Some of our savvy users may already appreciate the advantages of this approach, and we are confident that the continued improvements being made will translate into a better Google Talk experience for all our users.

Chee Chew
Engineering Director

In our most recent release we have added several new improvements to Google Sites. We pay attention to our Sites discussion group and try to prioritize ideas that make the most sense or that people are most passionate about. To that end, here is a rundown of some of the most recently added features.

Auto-save in edit mode

Ever been dealt the crushing blow of losing unsaved work? Like when your computer crashes 5 seconds before you were going to hit submit on your masterful rant about, let’s say, the most recent addition to the Indiana Jones series? You can now breathe easier when authoring pages in Google Sites, because we’ve got your back. Once you start editing a page, Google Sites will automatically save your edits after a few seconds and a message that your draft has been saved will be displayed on the far right hand side of the editor.

Page names & URLs

It used to be that you had one shot to choose the URL of any newly created page, which was automatically generated based on the page name entered. So if your page name was “The Magnificent Seven”, the end of your URL would look something like “/the-magnificent-seven”. Now you can change the page URL at any time by going to the “More Actions menu -> Page Settings”, and changing the “Page URL” field at the bottom. So say you want a more abbreviated version, and you change it to “mag7″. Once you click “Save”, the page refreshes with the new URL, and you’re done. The beauty of this is that any inbound links from other pages to the original page will automatically be updated to the new “mag7″ page name and will not break.

Support for links in List pages

A popular question from our users was “How do I create a link in my list?”. And so the “URL” column type was born. Using the same Link picker that is used in the page editor, you can now enter URLs to external websites or existing pages within your site. In the example, I used the Link picker (by clicking the “or, select existing page” link) to select the existing Magnificent Seven page from earlier.

Creating new pages in the Link picker dialog

Say you want to add links to other pages without first having to create the pages – basically, you want to start from the top down instead of bottom up. In traditional wiki parlance, this is called forward linking, and there’s usually a special syntax that you need to use. Google Sites has taken a different approach than the typical wiki mechanisms — we’ve integrated the flows of linking to pages and creating pages into a single process. As you’re editing a page, start by clicking the “Link” button to launch the link picker dialog. Then, look for the “Create new page” button at the bottom. When you click it, you can create a new page on the spot, without leaving the current page. Type in a name for the new page, hit “Create page”, and you’ll be sent right back to the original link picker dialog with the new page selected for you. Just hit “OK” and you’re done — in one fell swoop you’ve created a new page and linked to it without ever leaving the warm comforts of the Link dialog.

Custom site landing page configuration

In Google Sites it used to be that every time you logged in to your site, you would be automatically sent to your “Home” page at /Home. In the interest of giving site owners more control over their site, we now allow site owners to configure which page is shown as the landing page. Head on over to “Site Settings” -> “Other Stuff” to check it out.

Posted by Reuben Antman, Software Engineer

Posted by: Kevin Grendelzilla Lim, Technical Writer

We created a new developer guide from scratch and moved it to code.google.com, where many other API documents reside. This means that the bells and whistles of Google Code are available to the Custom Search developer guide. For example, you can now search for information across multiple APIs (Not that we’re bragging, but Custom Search powers the search on that website).

Fine, we’ll admit that the new doc is not exactly a-thrill-a-minute, but it’s definitely stuffed with more examples (and pretty pictures). The new organization, navigation, and search box make it easier for you to find information. The guide also discusses background information, explains complex concepts, makes recommendations, and points you to the right direction.

We’re still tinkering with the doc and adding more stuff into it. We’ll keep you posted about our progress.

Happy reading!

Back in December, we released translation bots for Google Talk. While machine translation isn’t 100% accurate, the idea of reducing language barriers with automated chat translations appealed to many people, and we received a lot of positive feedback. So when Google Translate recently added new languages, we decided to create chat bots for these languages.

The new bots speak Bulgarian (bg), Croatian (hr), Czech (cs), Danish (da), Finnish (fi), Hindi (hi), Norwegian (no), Polish (pl), Portuguese (pt), Romanian (ro), Swedish (sv) and Traditional Chinese (zh-hant).

There are 26 new bots: bg2en, cs2en, da2en, en2bg, en2cs, en2da, en2fi, en2hi, en2hr, en2no, en2pl, en2pt, en2ro, en2sv, en2zh-hant, fi2en, hi2en, hr2en, no2en, pl2en, pt2en, ro2en, sv2en, zh-hant2en, zh-hant2zh, zh2zh-hant. For reference you can also check out the full list of supported language combinations. To add one of these bots to your contacts, remember to use the following format [from language]2[to language]@bot.talk.google.com.

Toivon, että pidät siitä!

For those that don’t know Finnish…

Jonas Lindberg
Software Engineer

Posted by: Matt Wytock and Vrishali Wagle, Software Engineers

Today, we announced Google Site Search, a hosted website search product that takes advantage of the Custom Search platform to offer high quality search to any website. Google Site Search integrates features that offer site visitors a search experience closer to what they’re used to on Google.com. Here are a few of the new features:

• Expanded coverage: We already search through all of your pages that are in the Google.com index. Tell us about more pages on your site by submitting a Sitemap. We’ll crawl your Sitemap and add these pages to your custom search engine so that your search engine has the maximum coverage. (These additional pages will only be available to your custom search engine; your PageRank and Google.com rankings won’t change in any way.)

• Custom Synonyms: You can now define custom synonyms for your custom search engine. For example, you can define “cd” as meaning”certificate of deposit.” When a visitor searches for “cd” on your search engine, we will return pages that contain either “cd” or “certificate of deposit.” You can specify these synonyms in the XML definition of your search engine.

• Date Biasing: Fine-tune the relevance of search results by specifying a bias for newer documents. We allow various levels of biasing, the highest of which approximately sorts by date.

• Top Results Biasing: If you want the first N results to always match a refinement, you can specify that as a property of the refinement. We will try to fill up the top N positions with results matching that refinement before showing other relevant results.

We’re not done with Custom Search and are always thinking about ways to add new features. Stay tuned, as we’ve only just begun.