Month: November 2007

If you saw this one coming, give yourself a very large prize. Google is experimenting with Digg style voting features on search results that allow users to vote up or bury search results they see.

What is it?

Google is always experimenting with new features aimed at improving the search experience.

This experiment lets you influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. When you search for the same keywords again, you’ll continue to see those changes. If you later want to revert your changes, you can undo any modifications you’ve made. Note that this is an experimental feature and may be available for only a few weeks.

How do I use it?

Like it?

This button (fig. 1b) will move the result to the top of the page and add this orange marker (fig. 1a) next to it so you can easily recognize it. The result(s) you promote will appear at the top whenever you search for the same keyword(s) in the future.

Don’t like it?

This button (fig. 1b) will remove the result, and it will remain hidden when you search for the same keyword(s) in the future.

Know of a better webpage?

At the bottom of the search results (fig. 1c) you can give the address of a page that’s relevant to your search. When you search for these same keyword(s) the page you’ve suggested will appear at the top with this orange marker .

Is it permanent?

Your changes will be applied each time you search for the same keyword(s). There’s a link at the bottom of the search results that lets you view the results in their original ordering.

Do you have to be signed in?

Yes. To see your changes next time, you must be signed in to your Google account.

Google has filed 3 new patents for its Google Notebook service which suggest plans to use Notebook listings as an additional factor in calculating Google’s search engine rankings.

Are you using Google Notebook?

There’s no denying that the web enables communication. The killer apps of the web — email, instant messaging, blogging — have enabled us to communicate with our friends, family, and the rest of the world on a large scale. But there is a newer characteristic of the web that has been emerging: to become social. The first wave of killer apps allowed us to communicate with the world at scale. The next wave is about connecting us and our online activities with our friends. (And your customer base)

Social networks have seen that next wave, and have started opening up developer APIs to enable third-party innovation on their websites. This is a great thing, but it has also led to a growing number of APIs which a developer must learn. So we took a look at the state of the web and asked how we could make development easier for both websites and developers. Out of that exercise came OpenSocial.

OpenSocial is a set of common APIs that will work on many different social websites, including MySpace, Hi5, Ning, orkut, and LinkedIn, among others. In addition, this allows developers to learn one API, then write a social application for any of those sites. Learn once, write anywhere, if you will. And because it’s built on web standards like HTML and JavaScript, developers don’t have to learn a custom programming language.

Perhaps most interestingly, we will see social capabilities move into new contexts. OpenSocial will also work in non-traditional social contexts, such as on Salesforce.com and Oracle. With a common set of APIs, it will be even easier to extend social functionality. Beyond the many fun and entertaining social applications we already have seen, we think we’ll see a number of social applications emerge in business contexts.

Lastly, the web is global, and so is the scope of OpenSocial. When you add up the current websites who have committed to implementing OpenSocial, you realize that a developer building for OpenSocial has the chance to reach over 200M+ users in dozens of countries. So over the course of the next few months, we’re going to continue laying the foundations of OpenSocial to enable this common dream for a more social web.

So get started today. First, sign up for the Orkut sandbox so you can begin building and testing. Next, take a look at the OpenSocial API docs. Finally, start thinking about the possibilities given all of the websites that are implementing OpenSocial.