Bye bye Writely – hello Google Docs and Spreadsheets Inside Google has been reporting on the (happening right now) launch of docs.google.com which should be a shared login for both the writely successor and spreadsheets which is now known as Google Docs and Spreadsheets. It appears to support IE 6 and Firefox.
Category: Google
-
NO, Google has NOT cancelled click-to-call
It was an odd message that started this on the official google blog. I saw it and thought this doesn’t make sense – it doesn’t sound like an official statement and it claims it was translated from another language???? Posted by “Maximal” here is the original Google Blog post…
After concientiously considering, Google has decided not to continue with Google Click-to-call project. The project has been in the media on last days because of the notice of Google agreement with e-Bay. We finally consider click-to-call agreement with e-Bay a monopolistic aproach that would damage small companies in the CRM area.
This message has been translated using Google language tools.
-
Google puts historical articles online, searchable
Wow, this is nice – and frankly, something I could probably spend hours with. Search Engine Watch tells us that Google will debut a searchable news archive that takes us back through around 200 years worth of news stories. Yes, folks, google is putting the last 200 years of history online. I remember the newsgroups being google-ized was a big deal and that just took us back to the beginnings of the modern internet…. Well, in actuality the articles aren’t hosted at google, but at either the content providers or their aggregation services….
-
Open Source OCR
I remember several years back I tried out gocr which is an open source character recognition engine. I wasn’t thoroughly impressed, but it sort of worked. Yesterday, I saw the news that Google has released Tesseract as an open source Optical Character Recognition engine. It was originally developed by HP and has been shelved for some time, it’s supposed to be among the top 3 in accuracy according to testing by UNLV. The source code is available at their sourceforge.net page. It’ will be good to see this taken up and integrated as a backend by open source scanning applications. (Maybe even office suites as a “recognize text in image file” type option….)
-
Google will allow downloads of out-of-copyright books
It’s certainly a brief story, but to the point…. Google will allow pdf downloads of the books in their book search that are already out of copyright. Of course, copyright law is a strange and peculiar thing to many people, so this doesn’t mean that EVERY edition of “The Canterbury Tales” is now freely downloadable. So, it may take a bit of digging to find the free downloads for some of the titles you’re searching for, but they can be found and downloaded. They do categorize by “limited preview” and “full view” books. It’s possible to JUST search “Full view” books as well.
-
Google Coupons and improving Picasa
There are a couple of stories on the “Google front” today. First up Coupons tied into Google location searching (maps.) More details at the Adwords blog. (BTW, this is open to US businesses, an Adwords account is not a requirement.) It looks like they’ll put up printable coupons for businesses. There seem to be quite a few possibilities for extending this idea. (More coverage here.) The next item puts to rest a rumor from some time back. It seems as though at one point in time, Google was interested in Riya, who specializes in image recognition (hey – that’s Bob in that picture.)
-
Real time Global strategy game using Google Maps?
Some time back, there was a Risk clone using Google maps which was interesting, but taken offline due to a legal letter. Well, I have had a long interest in strategy games…. (Risk/Axis&Allies and variants as well as the civilization/freeciv variety and Age of Empires/etc….) Anyway… saw this last week… Online strategy game using Google Maps. Upon visiting, I found out the site has moved under heavy load to a new location…. Here’s the new site gmworldwar.com. I don’t know, I’m not terribly eager to strategize world war right now – it seems a bit too much like reality seem to be shaping up for right now… Anyway – it’s called Endgame and uses Google Maps as the back end. It’s currently limited to beta testers due to high demand so, the general public will have to wait.
-
Google search results catching up…
Some time back I complained about the Google indexing of the site after the Big Daddy upgrade. For a good while before Big Daddy, there was usually about a week delay between me posting and there being a full crawl of the posted page which was fairly impressive. Post Big-Daddy the coverage of even previously indexed articles was lousy for a good while. As recent as a week or two ago there were only 900-1100 pages (including feeds which are of arguable value for google to index (maybe I should block those to googlebot?…hmm…) Anyway, I just noticed that they’re up to 1600 pages (still including those rss feeds.) It seems spotty still, but they’ve finally got a post-big daddy article. The inurl feature is still annoyingly buggy though.
-
Google trying to warn about dangerous pages
SunbeltBlog is talking about a new sign that Google is stepping up to try to protect users against potentially malicious sites. They have a screenshot, which I was able to verify, that gives a warning before allowing a user to proceed to a page that “Warning – the site you are about to visit may harm your computer!”. Very good, I suspect they’re either tagging sites based on certain keywords or perhaps even binary blobs found?
-
Google Toolbar evil?
Boy, that would bring in comments…. Googling Google highlighted some behaviour of the Google toolbar that seems a bit fishy. It appears that it blocks attempts to modify the default search provider in Internet Explorer. This was first reported over at Google blogoscoped and appears to be a bug (after the toolbar process is closed it fails to close completely.) Google says they’re working on a fix.