Webware

Google now intends to deliver customized search results even to those searching its site without having signed into a Google account.

Google keeps a history of your Web searches for up to 180 days, using what it says is an anonymous cookie in your browser to track your search queries and the results you most frequently click on. For several years it has allowed those with Google accounts to receive customized search results based on that history, but now even those without Google accounts will receive tailored results based on a history of their search activity, Google said in a blog post late Friday.

For example, Google described in a video how the query "SOX" might signal one type of search intent coming from baseball fans in Boston or Chicago, and another type of intent from an accountant closing the books on the quarter. Based on that particular person's search profile, Google can promote links to baseball scores or Sarbanes-Oxley details higher in search results than other links affiliated with those queries.

This, of course, is not just about search results. By building a profile of past searches, Google can also gain insights into what kinds of advertising you're most likely to favor, therefore placing more targeted (and expensive) ads alongside those search results

Privacy advocates will likely be put off by the fact that this is an opt-out rather than opt-in service. Beforehand, the customized search results were only available to those who were signed into a Google account, and although Google has always stored the search history of anyone who visits its site, it didn't change individual search results based on that history.

Google was careful to describe the procedure for opting out of personalized results, and emphasized that it doesn't know who specifically is attached to a given set of search queries. But in essence, even those who search Google without being signed in can now be used to help Google improve the targeting of its search results and its ads.

An overview of how Google arrives at Personalized Search results.

(Credit: Google)

Google, probably the most prominent advocate of moving traditional productivity software such as word processors online, acquired a small company called AppJet whose EtherPad service fits into that agenda.

AppJet announced the Google acquisition Friday. "The EtherPad team will continue its work on real-time collaboration by joining the Google Wave team," the site said.

AppJet offered free and premium versions of its service, which could import Microsoft Word documents, Web pages, PDFs, and plain text files, and let groups of people edit them collectively on what it called pad. A "time-slider" feature let people look back at earlier incarnations of a pad.

Google Wave has similarities. It's a sort of hybrid between instant messaging, wikis, and e-mail. Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt sees Google Wave as the future of collaboration, in particular given its intrinsically networked nature and its real-time view of what collaborating people are up to.

That real-time collaboration is a thorny problem. It can be difficult to permit multiple people permission to edit the same document at the same time while ensuring one person's changes don't interfere with another's work. And showing simultaneous work complicates a service's user interface, too.

Google Docs--the online word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation services--also offers some simultaneous editing abilities. AppJet dings it in its EtherPad FAQ.

"With Google Docs it takes about 5 to 15 seconds for a change to make its way from your keyboard to other people's screens," the site said. "Imagine if whiteboards or telephones had this kind of delay!"

Google Wave and Google Docs are perhaps the closest rivals to AppJet, but in the big picture, the rivalry is between cloud computing and the way most people use productivity software today, on their PCs. Notably, though, Microsoft is working on an online version of its dominant Office suite.

Current EtherPad users should brace themselves for the end of the service: "If you are a user of the Free Edition or Professional Edition, you can continue to use and edit your existing pads until March 31, 2010. No new free public pads may be created. Your pads will no longer be accessible after March 31, 2010, at which time your pads and any associated personally identifiable information will be deleted," AppJet said.

That left one user, JavaScript programmer and jQuery project creator, John Resig, unhappy.

"Super-lame that Etherpad is shutting down. We used it all the time for jQuery planning," Resig said in a tweet on Friday.

Google Finance now offers streaming news related to the stock market.

(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)

Google has added a few new features in hopes of attracting more users to Google Finance, blending financial stories from Google News right into the mix.

Yahoo owns the online financial information market with Yahoo Finance (rated first in its category by ComScore with 22 million unique visitors in September), but Google is trying to carve out a niche for itself by adding a so-called "real time" stream of news to Google Finance pages. On the main Google Finance page, users can now click on a news tab that brings up what appears to be a constantly updated Google News-powered stream of news stories related to the general market or specific portfolios set up as part of a profile.

The stories seem to update every minute or so, but Google will only turn on the streaming service between 8 a.m. ET and 5:30 p.m. ET, 90 minutes before and after the U.S. stock market trading hours. Google also said it has added a list of the recent quotes users look up on the service, as well as real-time streaming of stock prices on pages dedicated to individual stocks--all services currently available on Yahoo Finance.

Google is making a new move to lower language barriers, offering the ability to translate search results from one language to another.

The search giant is in the process of adding the feature to the "show options" button that shows at the top of search results page. "We've offered this feature in Google Translate for a while, but now we're integrating it fully into Google search, making it easier for you to find and read results from pages across the web, even if they weren't written in a language you speak," said Maureen Heymans, the project's technical leader, and Jeff Chin, its product manager, in a blog post.

Clicking the option can dramatically change the results you see. For example, my ordinary search for "Taipei Museum of Fine Art" produced mostly English-language results. The translated results, though, featured Chinese Web sites with a different perspective (see the result below). Among other things, there was a Chinese Wikipedia entry--also conveniently translated by Google when I clicked the link--where there is none written in English.

Google.com won't show any of the links in the image on the right until a home page visitor moves his or her mouse.

(Credit: Google)

After testing a new-look home page for several weeks, Google is ready to roll it out to the masses.

Google announced the new "fade-in" look for its home page Wednesday, combining its goal of minimalism and its desire to promote Google products beyond search. Starting Monday, visitors to Google.com will be greeted by a page totally devoid of anything but the Google logo, the search bar, and the search buttons. Google tends to roll out these types of changes gradually, so you may not see it at first.

That is, until they move their mouse. That will bring up the regular links at the top of the page to image search, news, settings, and the various other links off the home page that Google has added over the years.

Google ran about 10 different versions of the change before settling on this one, said Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products, in a blog post. The company is famously exacting about the changes to what could be considered the Web's most valuable piece of real estate.

The new look doesn't seem to be affiliated with the search user interface changes that Google is also testing, although the company plans to hold a search event on Monday that could reveal more details around that design.

(Credit: Google)

Before Wednesday, you could star a map as a favorite on Google Maps online, and you could star one on Google Maps for Mobile, but you could never connect the two.

A small but significant update that Google added to Google Maps for Mobile 3.3 now syncs your starred locations between the map app on your Symbian and Windows phones, and your online account.

To start your syncing, press Menu and then Starred Items. You'll need to log into your account from the Starred Items screen to start syncing favorite maps. If you're upgrading from a previous version of the maps app, you'll be asked if you'd like to sync your favorites. Say yes.

Then, you're able to mark your favorite places in one location and have it surface in the other, as long as you remain logged in. This type of syncing is ideal for quickly locating that dinner spot you're headed to, or for pulling up driving directions to or from a starred location. Sure, it might make you lazy, but it'll also keep you from wasting precious time first looking up a location and then seeking directions or a phone number.

You can download Google Maps for Mobile by pointing your mobile browser to m.google.com/maps.

Word from the LA Times is that Google plans to phase out its Gears plug-in in favor of HTML5 when it comes to augmenting browser abilities. The precise details of its enthusiasm for the plug-in aren't clear yet, but the general trajectory is no surprise.

Google, along with Mozilla, Opera, Apple, and some other allies, has been agitating for features that can make browsers and the Web into a more powerful foundation for Web sites and Web applications. Gears was an early Google effort in this area.

But Gears emerged in 2007--back before Google released a browser of its own, before the World Wide Web Consortium had put its full weight behind HTML5, before HTML5 had gotten the traction it now enjoys as an official standard in the making, and before Microsoft took interest in contributing to that standard.

It's clear things are different now, and HTML5 is solving the same problems Gears set out to fix, and a healthy cooperation is under way for future Web standards work.

Linus Upson, Google's engineering director for the Chrome browser and Chrome OS, confirmed Tuesday that Gears will be supported but isn't an active area of development.

"This isn't an area we've been investing a lot in the last year since we launched Chrome. We're very focused on making HTML5 as successful a standard as possible," Upson said. "Gears applications will run well for the foreseeable future," though, he added.

Browsers including Safari and Chrome are picking up HTML5 versions of Gears features now, he said, and Web applications will follow suit. "I would think over course of next year or so you'll see many more applications take advantage of those abilities," he said.

Perhaps the most notable Gears feature is the ability to store data on a PC so a Web application could work even when disconnected from the network--Gmail and Google Docs being the biggest examples. But that's solved by the local database work in HTML5 that's now arriving in browsers. HTML5 also provides for interfaces with files for better uploading geolocation to let a Web site make use of a person's location.

Various HTML5 elements are just beginning to arrive in Web browsers, and widely used browsers such as Internet Explorer 6 don't have any support at all. But the difficulties of getting people to install Gears or other plug-ins means that built-in browser support probably will reach more people sooner than Gears.

Google has given plenty of signals it's happy to direct Gears energy into HTML5. It proudly demonstrated offline Gmail using HTML5 storage last May at its Google I/O conference, for example. And regarding its O3D and Native Client plug-ins, which accelerate 3D and regular computing processes in a browser, Google developers have argued such technology should be built into the browser, not handled as a separate plug-in.

Google's official position, quoted in the LA Times, is as follows: "We are excited that much of the technology in Gears, including offline support and geolocation APIs, are being incorporated into the HTML5 spec as an open standard supported across browsers, and see that as the logical next step for developers looking to include these features in their Web sites...We're continuing to support Gears so that nothing breaks for sites that use it. But we expect developers to use HTML5 for these features moving forward as it's a standards-based approach that will be available across all browsers."

It was clear from talks at Google I/O that Google sees as a proving ground to try to advance Web technologies and counts it as a victory when Gears technology arrives in HTML5. Now the only real question in my mind is whether the pace of HTML5 development in the standards world will satisfy Google.

Upson said Google will continue adding features into Chrome and its Chrome OS, even if that means deviating from standards at times.

"Ideally for all these things (such as Native Client and O3D) we'd like to get them into standards," Upson said. "At the end of the day, we can't control the pace of the Internet Explorer developer team at Microsoft (or developer teams) at Mozilla and Apple. We all have a shared incentive to not fragment the Web, but there always will be seams that aren't smooth."

Updated at 5:14 p.m. PST with comment from Google.

Reading The Wall Street Journal articles for free through Google News will get harder if the paper decides to embrace Google's new changes to its "First Click Free" policy.

(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)

As the journalism industry gathers once again to wring its hands about the future, Google has thrown it a bone with new limitations on its "First Click Free" policy for news stories shown on Google News.

Companies that operate subscription-based Web sites--such as The Wall Street Journal--don't want to expose the full text of their articles to Google. But despite what WSJ owner Rupert Murdoch says, most of them also want their articles and sites discoverable through Google and Google News. As a compromise, Google has allowed those publishers to participate in what it calls a "First Click Free" program, where articles accessed through Google News links can be seen in their entirety, but if the user attempts to click anywhere else on that story page, they are directed to a sign-up page.

The problem is that Web users quickly figured out that you can access almost any Wall Street Journal article for free simply by cutting and pasting the headline into Google News, which generates a "free" link that isn't available if a publisher such as CNET links to a Wall Street Journal article. "While we're happy to see that a number of publishers are already using First Click Free, we've found that some who might try it are worried about people abusing the spirit of First Click Free to access almost all of their content," wrote John Mueller, Webmaster trends analyst for Google, in a blog post.

As a result, Google is now putting limits on the First Click Free usage. Web publishers can now decide to limit use of the First Click Free rule to five times per person per day through both Google News and regular Google search results. It's not clear whether readers could get around this issue by clearing cookies from their browser or enabling private browsing, but a Google representative said it will be up to Web publishers to decide how they want to track visitors through some combination of cookies or IP addresses.

Google is one of many companies and organizations participating in a day-long discussion about the future of journalism at the Federal Trade Commission in Washington. The topic has pitted Google against the publishing industry all year, with Google insisting it's a friend of journalism by sending traffic toward media companies, and media companies accusing Google of siphoning their potential traffic by showing headlines and snippets on Google News.

To show support for the global fight against AIDS, both Google and Twitter changed up their sites a bit Tuesday.

If you go to Google.com, you'll find a link under the search box that leads to several resources where you can learn more about AIDS, volunteer to fight the disease, and donate money to fight AIDS. It's no small contribution to the cause--Google's home page is undoubtedly driving considerable traffic to all the organizations the company lists.

Twitter has turned red for World AIDS Day.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Twitter has introduced a more obvious change to its site. Whenever a user adds the hashtag #red to their tweets, the message they update their status page with will be displayed in red to followers. Users can also add the hashtag #laceupsavelives to turn their tweets red. The change is part of the Turn Red initiative, which aims at battling AIDS in Africa.

You can learn more about Join Red and the fight against AIDS on the organization's Twitter page.