Googlified

Google has tons of pranks for this year’s April Fool’s Day, including Gmail Custom Time, Virgle: The Adventure of Many Lifetimes, Google Wake Up Kit, and more!

• Gmail Custom Time: It enables you to send email back until April 1, 2004.
• Google Human Search (Chinese): searches 250 million volunteers by their personal characteristics.
• Virgle: Virgin and Google team up together to create Project Virgle to build a second Earth on Mars - just in case Earth gives up on us - in the next 100 years.
• Google Wake Up Kit - The kit from Google Calendar is designed to wake you up by whatever means possible - including “a bed-flipping device … for forceful removal from your sleeping quarters.” Google Calendar also added a “I’m Feeling Lucky” button that sets you up for dates with celebrities.
• gDay - Brought to you by the Google Australia team, it let’s you to search contents on the Internet even before it’s created! - “Hi guys, I am from the future.”
• Scratch-and-sniff books - Google Books is “now able to capture some of the smells during the scanning process” and you can smell them in the preview pages!
• Greener Google Talk: To reduce the amount carbon dioxide produced by instant messaging, Google Talk will now shorten the number of characters used in a IM message by “abbreviating words and dropping vowels” - the so-called IM-speak.
• Google Dajare (Japanese): The mission of this project is “to organize the world’s laughter, (allow) people around the world (to) have access to what(ever) they want.”
• YTRickRollsYou - “We’re no strangers to love, You know the rules and so do I … Never gonna give you up, Never gonna let you down … We’ve know each other for so long” - click on any feature videos on YouTube (no, this is not rickroll).
• Google Cash (Russian) - Now you can install the Google Cash portable right from your office or home and make payments for advertising cash roubles - designed exclusively for Russian AdWords users. (I thought the machine is designed to print money to pay for the users’ online advertising campaigns…)
• Yogurt: the new Orkut!
• Google Docs Airplane: Stop typing the boring documents, fold an airplane instead! Go to Google Docs and create a “New airlane!“
• Google Weblogs - New service from Blogger that “Publish text to the web in reverse chronological order.” OMG, this is going to be SO COOL!
• AdSense for Conversation: AdSense will display ads that are relevant to the conversations that you engage in on a headgear that Google provides for you to wear. Also AdSense for Phone Calls (Portuguese).
• FrankRank: a new AdWords ranking algorithm inspired by Frank the hand turkey.

Happy April Fool’s Day everyone! :)

Blogoscoped forum member Hermon says that Google is testing a new homepage for Book Search. Unlike the current homepage that only has a search box, the new one offers book suggestions: the “interesting” ones, classics, highly cited ones, and random ones…

The new testing design also has some links on the left side which links to different categories of books, such as Sci-Fi, Romance, Philosophy, Linguistics, and Astrology.

Google’s Book Search service has introduced several new features today, including My Library and embeddable book clips.  To add a book to your online collection on Google Book My Library, just click on the corresponding “Add to my library” link on the result page or on the “About this book” page. Or you can import a list of books by entering their ISBN numbers in the “Import books” utility. Since your library is public and you can export it in XML format, it’s possible (and damn easy) to create a gadget (and the alike) for your blog/website. :)

The second feature, embeddable book clips, allows users to select text/image from public domain books and share them without all those screen-capturing hassle. To use the feature, just click on the  button, click-and-drag over the region of text you want to share, then you will be asked how would you like to embed the clip.

Other new features are view/add reviews and view popular passages from the book.

Wow, they have been working!

Google today launched a new feature, text-mode, for Google Books that makes the service more accessible for users that are visually impaired. Currently the books available in text-mode are those under the public domain, which are also downloadable in PDF format.

Since the text-mode is still in its early stage, the image-mode is the default option, to switch to the text-mode, you will need to click on the “View plain text” link on the sidebar at right.

To better the service, they will need to reformat the text. I can barely read a page without feeling dizzy.

Looks like Google needs to get their scanners fixed. This is how the front cover of this book should look like…

[thanks tenz]

Googler (Noogler, actually) Matthew Gray shares some interesting statistics about the locations mentioned in the Google Book Search index - over a million books - with a map.

Using a set of data that was previously collected by David Petrou, another Googler, for the purpose of visualizing “places mentioned in books on a map”, Matthew “wrote a little program using [some] cool Google stuff” and “had a map in forty-five minutes” with the Google infrastructure, instead of days on a desktop. Wow.

As you can see in the above image, most of the places that were mentioned are in the U.S., Europe, and India. “Filtering the map by publication date, you can see global patterns like the growth and westward expansion of the United States in the 19th century.” Matthew explained, and you can find the maps here.

I am wondering what are the colors represent: does it go from green, blue, to red?

The Bavarian State Library has joined Google Book Search’s Library Project, becoming the 13th partner in the program. The Bavarian State Library is the largest library partner located outside the U.S, here are some statistics:

• ca. 9 million books
• 90,200 manuscripts
• ca. 47,200 subscription periodicals and monographic series (Europe’s second largest holding)
• 19,900 incunabula (the world’s largest holding)

Now look at Google Book Library Project’s current standing:

• Publisher partners: Over 10,000 from around the world
• Library partners: 13 today
• Books in the index: Over a million
• Book Search interfaces: 9 (English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, and Simplified and Traditional Chinese)

Yeah, there are abundant of books, but only a few of them are Full View enabled…

The Google China Blog today announced that they have launched the Chinese version of Google Book Search, making it the 8th language to enter the program.

The coolest thing is that this guy, Zola, already found a book with a back cover upside down! :)

Incrediblely sweet! (You don’t have to read the Chinese, just look at the ISBN number)

also read: The Google Fingers