Google Data

A while back we mentioned that we’ve been working with Sony Ericsson to incorporate blogging into their new generation of cameraphones. Well, the k800 has started to hit the market and our friends in Sweden have a helpful graphic to explain how it all…

We just posted a public issue tracking website for the Google AJAX Search API. This is to make it easier to track our progress on bugs and feature requests. As you encounter issues with the API, you can report them in the developer forum and we’ll add…

By Ellen Beldner, User Experience DesignerToday we launched a feature on Google Base that will let you attach certain types of files to your Google Base item. You can still upload pictures of your item and we’ll display them in a picture show when peop…

beet.tv, the self-styled ‘root of the media revolution,’ is shaking things up. With all that’s changing in the world of online media, you can count on beet to be covering it. Check out some of their content, and be sure to check out their site.Today’s …

Posted by Alex Franz and Thorsten Brants, Google Machine Translation TeamHere at Google Research we have been using word n-gram models for a variety of R&D projects, such as statistical machine translation, speech recognition, spelling correction, …

By Donal Mountain, User Experience teamAs a user experience researcher on the Base team, it’s my job to really understand how you are using Base. I spend much of my time observing people who already use Base every day.I do this research in order to lea…

Feeds can be used for more than just text; they can embed pictures, podcasts and video. There are even more esoteric bits of data that can be attached to feeds, like the geographic location that a post is about, the number of comments it has received and that (legal) license its contents are available under. To make all of this information easily parseable by computers, it is usually available as additional items and attributes in XML namespaces. For example, the Media RSS namespace is used to add more information about videos and pictures, like dimensions, duration and a thumbnail.

This usually isn’t of direct interest to end users, it’s just matter of which namespaced extensions a feed reader supports, and the more the merrier. However, since there are quite a few ones out there, developers must make trade-offs and decisions. One easy way to prioritize extension support is to see which ones are used more often.

I wrote a small MapReduce program to go over our BigTable and get the top 50 namespaces based on the number of feeds that use them. This means that we only looked at feeds that have at least one subscriber, i.e. the “feeds that matter.” Note that the default namespaces for syndication feed formats (e.g. http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom for Atom 1.0) are excluded, since I was interested only in extensions to the elements that are already expected to be in a feed.

We thought this information might be of interest to others, the way our analysis of XML errors and web authoring statistics have been. If I have missed anything, or if you have any feedback, a message in our discussion group or a link to this blog post is the best way to reach us.

Posted by Lance Cotton, Online Operations Sr. Training SpecialistWe want Google Checkout users to have a great purchase experience, and we know that to achieve this, training you and your team—the people who directly interact with users—is …

Posted by Arielle Reinstein, Associate Product Marketing ManagerOne hundred and thirty years ago today, gunfighter Wild Bill was famously murdered by Crooked Nose Jack. That might sound like an episode of Deadwood — the fourth episode of the first sea…

While we love all the fresh content that gets uploaded to Google Video, we get really excited to see archival material put online. Today’s highlight is a fantastic reel with 25 minutes of TV commercials from the 1950s and 1960s, for everything from sha…

Posted by Eva Hung, Strategic Partner ManagerWe’re thrilled to see Google Checkout helping merchants across the web, and we hope the service has helped your store already. I’d like to share a few best practices we’ve been seeing that may help you be ev…

We’ve always tried to make embedding a video as easy as possible. Recently, we added the ability to link to a specific point in a video, but it wasn’t clear how to embed with a specific start point. If you want to share a specific part of a video on yo…

Tracking multiple subdomains? Want to track different parts of your site separately? Need to track more than four goals for a website? All of this is easier now, because we’ve increased the default number of profiles from 5 to 10. And if you’re not sur…

Posted by Bethany Poole, Product Marketing ManagerI’m brand new at Google, so I’ve been digging around on our site, exploring everything I can click on. Yesterday, I was talking with a few colleagues about the parallel universe hidden inside Google Boo…

Posted by Catalin Patulea, Software EngineerSome gadgets are simply better when you share them, and if you’re thinking of creating such a gadget, you’re in luck. By means of the Communication API, Google Desktop allows a gadget to exchange data with an…