Entries from October 2008 ↓
October 30th, 2008 — Custom Search
Posted by: Cedric Dupont, Product Manager
Knol is a project aimed at helping people share their knowledge
. Knols (units of knowledge) are authoritative articles written by people about a specific subject, ranging from
tooth pain to
solar energy to
buttermilk pancakes. With all of these knols to browse, our readers have been begging us for a more powerful search tool. Well, today we have good news – we’ve added the power of Custom Search to Knol.
Custom Search gives us all of the speed and relevance of Google’s search technology, but required none of the hard labor that went into making Google search what it is today. With Custom Search, Knol visitors will have a fast search experience that features all of the bells and whistles Google searchers have come to love (including our advanced spell checker). When you search within Knol, the search results look a little different from Web Search results (see this search for knee surgery, for instance). We were able to maintain that distinct feel for Knol search by taking advantage of the Custom Search XML results format (via Google Site Search) and creating the search result display that we wanted.
We want to hear from you if you have feedback on Knol search. Please leave your comment on our help page.
October 29th, 2008 — Reader
We are all passionate feed readers on the Google Reader team. For us, working on Reader is a dream job. Why? Because we have the perfect excuse when we’re caught browsing feeds at work!
For a bit of fun, and to show you what we like reading, we’ve put together a bundle of our favorite feeds. After much deliberation, we’ve narrowed down our “Staff Picks” to the following:
Not only do these feeds capture the personalities on our team, they are mainly all “full text” feeds (i.e. containing the original pictures, videos and text).
If you want to subscribe to all of these feeds at once, head over to our discover page and subscribe to the “Staff Picks” bundle (English only).
If you haven’t used Reader before, maybe these feeds might give you some ideas for websites you’d like to start tracking.
We hope you enjoy these feeds as much as we do!
October 29th, 2008 — Photos
posted by Mike Horowitz, Product Manager
Today’s a big day for us — we’re peeling the ‘beta’ label off of Picasa 3, and will shortly be rolling out an official ‘Picasa 3.0‘ update to our US-English Picasa 2 users.
Faster performance and increased stability were two important goals for Picasa 3, and we certainly owe a hat tip to the millions of Picasa fans who downloaded and helped test our public beta. Thanks to their feedback and error reports, we’ve further refined and and optimized today’s release of Picasa 3.0. Along with many bug fixes, the official Picasa 3 build includes improved RAW support and a faster scanning engine than the beta – so as you add or alter photos on your system, you’ll see changes reflected more quickly inside your Picasa library.
As always, let us know what you think of the new release by visiting our Google Group.
October 28th, 2008 — Reader
When we launched the Trends page last year, we wanted to visualize how we consumed data in Google Reader. One of the more interesting sections of the Trends page is the chart that shows items read by time. Spikes in the chart are a cool way of noticing patterns and possibly realizing that the reason we’re less productive on Fridays is because of Reader. Some of us on the Reader team are obsessed with keeping our unread counts low so we wondered if we were being driven by the posting schedule of our subscriptions. We thought the chart might be more interesting if we showed when posts were coming into Reader, so we are now graphing published statistics on the same chart. For example, in my set of subscriptions, even though I’m reading the majority of items in the evening, new posts seem to arrive in the middle of the day.
We also wanted to expose more fine-grained data. While it’s useful to know what your overall reading trends are, we thought it might be interesting to also display this data on a subscription by subscription level. If you’ve ever been curious about when your favorite subscriptions were publishing new posts or when you were reading them, click the “show details” link in the upper right corner of the viewer. It’s a good way to peak into your personal habits as well as the posting schedule of your favorite blogs. While you’re in there, check out the other details – we also display the last crawl time and any errors encountered during that crawl.
October 27th, 2008 — Blogger
As some of you might know, AOL has recently decided to sunset its AOL Journals service. To help Journals users continue to share their thoughts online, Blogger has built a simple migration tool to move an AOL Journal to Blogger. We’d like to welcome our new Blogger users to the community and are looking forward to hearing what they have to say!
We’ve been hard at work here at Blogger and have added a number of new features in the past few months. If you’re a Journals user who wants to explore our features, or even if you’re already a Blogger user but you want to see what’s new, check out our features page. Over in our user group you can share your blog with others or find new blogs to follow. If you’re still hungry for more blogs, the Blogger team regularly posts interesting and noteworthy Blogger-powered blogs at Blogs of Note.
Below are some more resources for new Journals users. Welcome again!
October 27th, 2008 — Mac
By Scott Knaster, Google Mac Team
Google Earth is now available for the iPhone! And it’s free, of course. Read all about it at the Google Mobile Blog.
October 24th, 2008 — Security
Written by Oliver Fisher
“This site may harm your computer”
You may have seen those words in Google search results — but what do they mean? If you click the search result link you get another warning page instead of the website you were expecting. But if the web page was your grandmother’s baking blog, you’re still confused. Surely your grandmother hasn’t been secretly honing her l33t computer hacking skills at night school. Google must have made a mistake and your grandmother’s web page is just fine…
I work with the team that helps put the warning in Google’s search results, so let me try to explain. The good news is that your grandmother is still kind and loves turtles. She isn’t trying to start a botnet or steal credit card numbers. The bad news is that her website or the server that it runs on probably has a security vulnerability, most likely from some out-of-date software. That vulnerability has been exploited and malicious code has been added to your grandmother’s website. It’s most likely an invisible script or iframe that pulls content from another website that tries to attack any computer that views the page. If the attack succeeds, then viruses, spyware, key loggers, botnets, and other nasty stuff will get installed.
If you see the warning on a site in Google’s search results, it’s a good idea to pay attention to it. Google has automatic scanners that are constantly looking for these sorts of web pages. I help build the scanners and continue to be surprised by how accurate they are. There is almost certainly something wrong with the website even if it is run by someone you trust. The automatic scanners make unbiased decisions based on the malicious content of the pages, not the reputation of the webmaster.
Servers are just like your home computer and need constant updating. There are lots of tools that make building a website easy, but each one adds some risk of being exploited. Even if you’re diligent and keep all your website components updated, your web host may not be. They control your website’s server and may not have installed the most recent OS patches. And it’s not just innocent grandmothers that this happens to. There have been warnings on the websites of banks, sports teams, and corporate and government websites.
Uh-oh… I need help!
Now that we understand what the malware label means in search results, what do you do if you’re a webmaster and Google’s scanners have found malware on your site?
There are some resources to help clean things up. The Google Webmaster Central blog has some tips and a quick security checklist for webmasters. Stopbadware.org has great information, and their forums have a number of helpful and knowledgeable volunteers who may be able to help (sometimes I’m one of them). You can also use the Google SafeBrowsing diagnostics page for your site (http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=<site-name-here>) to see specific information about what Google’s automatic scanners have found. If your site has been flagged, Google’s Webmaster Tools lists some of the URLs that were scanned and found to be infected.
Once you’ve cleaned up your website, use Google’s Webmaster Tools to request a malware review. The automatic systems will rescan your website and the warning will be removed if the malware is gone.
Advance warning
I often hear webmasters asking Google for advance warning before a malware label is put on their website. When the label is applied, Google usually emails the website owners and then posts a warning in Google’s Webmaster Tools. But no warning is given ahead of time – before the label is applied – so a webmaster can’t quickly clean up the site before a warning is applied.
But, look at the situation from the user’s point of view. As a user, I’d be pretty annoyed if Google sent me to a site it knew was dangerous. Even a short delay would expose some users to that risk, and it doesn’t seem justified. I know it’s frustrating for a webmaster to see a malware label on their website. But, ultimately, protecting users against malware makes the internet a safer place and everyone benefits, both webmasters and users.
Google’s Webmaster Tools has started a test to provide warnings to webmasters that their server software may be vulnerable. Responding to that warning and updating server software can prevent your website from being compromised with malware. The best way to avoid a malware label is to never have any malware on the site!
Reviews
You can request a review via Google’s Webmaster Tools and you can see the status of the review there. If you think the review is taking too long, make sure to check the status. Finding all the malware on a site is difficult and the automated scanners are far more accurate than humans. The scanners may have found something you’ve missed and the review may have failed. If your site has a malware label, Google’s Webmaster Tools will also list some sample URLs that have problems. This is not a full list of all of the problem URLs (because that’s often very, very long), but it should get you started.
Finally, don’t confuse a malware review with a request for reconsideration. If Google’s automated scanners find malware on your website, the site will usually not be removed from search results. There is also a different process that removes spammy websites from Google search results. If that’s happened and you disagree with Google, you should submit a reconsideration request. But if your site has a malware label, a reconsideration request won’t do any good — for malware you need to file a malware review from the Overview page.
How long will a review take?
Webmasters are eager to have a Google malware label removed from their site and often ask how long a review of the site will take. Both the original scanning and the review process are fully automated. The systems analyze large portions of the internet, which is big place, so the review may not happen immediately. Ideally, the label will be removed within a few hours. At its longest, the process should take a day or so.
October 24th, 2008 — Reader
We’ve always used Reader to keep up to date on news and current events and today it just got a little easier: The Guardian just moved all of their RSS feeds from partial to full-text. They are the first major newspaper in the world to do so, and this is, well, great news.
Over on their blog, they talk about making sure people can “get the guardian.co.uk experience in whatever context is most useful to them,” and now whether you’re interested in just the top stories (subscribe in Reader) or music album reviews (subscribe) or just articles on politics by Marina Hyde (subscribe), you can read them in their full-text form, here on Reader.
This is a huge first step in making more content available in more places, and we applaud the Guardian for taking it.
October 22nd, 2008 — Blogger
Today we’re bringing the embedded comment form out of Blogger in draft and making it easily available to everyone. This feature puts the comment form at the bottom of each post page, below the comments, instead of on the separate, Blogger-styled page.
The embedded comment form is more convenient for your readers because they can use it to post a comment immediately, without clicking over to a different page. It also looks better, since it matches your blog’s style and colors.
If you’re logged in to Blogger with your Google Account, you can also subscribe to comments via email by clicking the “Subscribe” link. Unlike with the full page comment form, you don’t need to post a comment to subscribe.
To enable the embedded comment form for your blog, go to the Settings > Comments page and look for the Comment Form Placement setting. Change it to Embedded below post, save your settings, and go check out a post to see the new form in action.
The embedded comment form works on both Classic and Layouts templates, though if you’re using a heavily-customized Layouts template you may need to reset your widget templates before the embedded comment form will appear.
We think that the embedded comment form is a big improvement, so we’ve made it the default setting for all new blogs.
Happy commenting!
Update, 10/23: We regret that this feature is being enabled for some existing blogs that didn’t specifically enable it. We are working to undo that, but in the meantime if you see this on your blog and don’t want it, go to Settings > Commenting and change Comment Form Placement to either “Full page” or “Pop-up window.”
October 22nd, 2008 — Blogger
Today, we’re releasing our Blogger Post Gadget for iGoogle. Now you can edit and publish posts directly from your custom iGoogle homepage, making it even easier to share your thoughts with the world.
To get started, just click that “+ Google” button to have the Blogger Post Gadget added to your iGoogle page.
You can use HTML in the text box, but if you want more rich text editing — for example, to upload a photo — just click “Save Draft” and you’ll get a link to edit the post in the full Blogger post editor.
