Webware

Have you ever wanted to type something in English and have the tool you're using spit that same message out in Hindi? What about Greek? With the help of Google's transliteration feature, you can.

The search giant's Bangalore office wrote that typing on Roman keyboards makes it "difficult to type in Indian languages." In an attempt to find a fix, the team in India released Google's Transliteration offering. And on Thursday it announced an update to the feature.

The new and improved Transliteration allows users to select from one of 17 different languages, including Arabic, Gujarati, Kannada, and Punjabi, to name a few. Once that's chosen, they can type a message in English and have it immediately transliterated to the selected language. Users can also look up word definitions in the included dictionary.

I took a few minutes to play around with the new Transliteration and it seems to work really well. I decided to type messages into Greek and Hindi and each time, it returned quick, accurate results.

Click here to try it out.

A look at Google Transliteration in action.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Google Labs is testing a new way of viewing images that it is calling Image Swirl. When you search for a term in Image Swirl, 12 different sets of related images appear.

For example, if you search for "Kentucky," you will get sets of Kentucky state maps, Kentucky flags, the Kentucky Derby, and various scenery of the state. As you drill down further into the results, you get to see more tightly refined sets of images based on what you choose.

A search for Paris' Arc de Triomphe on Google Image Swirl.

(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)

Image Swirl's interface is very similar to Google's Wonder Wheel. It also employs Google's previously developed technology for finding similar images as well as facial recognition. This is definitely a smarter image search than what we are used to.

Unfortunately, Image Swirl is not available for all search terms currently. It is reserved for 200,000 terms (which auto-complete in the search box) that Google has deemed worthy of being included. The company did say, however, that it plans to add more queries to the list moving forward.

So what do you think? Is Image Swirl cool? Lame? Important? Irrelevant? Let us know in the comments.

New start-up Factery Labs is launching its first service on Tuesday, a technology called FactRank that can tear through Web pages and collect what it calls "facts." These are bits of information from each source page that Factery Labs' algorithm then organizes into an order of importance.

What this means for you is that developers will soon make use of the technology in third-party search engines or on Web pages to very quickly deliver reading summaries. This cuts out most (or all) of the parts you don't care about, while organizing the bits you might. It also manages to do all this in real time.

The FactRank technology was created by Paul Pedersen, who has a good background in search, including gigs at Inktomi, Google, and Powerset. CNET News met with him and co-founder Sean Gaddis (former Skype and eBay'er) on Monday to get a demo of how the technology works.

In a nutshell it goes like this: FactRank goes through each Web page or source (in whatever index it's searching from) finding semantic tip-offs like declarative sentences. It then cross references each of those against one another, surfacing some of the most relevant ones to the top, as well as factoring in the order of how they appeared. What the user then gets is a tidy list of statements, each of which is sourced and given a level of relevancy based on their appearances in all of the indexed source pages combined.

Whew. Got that? Great, here's an example of what it looks like in motion, as seen on a basic search for Sarah Palin on Twitter:

One of the Factery Labs example applications is a search engine that finds facts from Twitter source results.

(Credit: CNET)

Of course, one of the problems with Factery Labs' approach across multiple sources--be it Twitter, or multiple URLs is accuracy; like how can it realize something like The Onion is not the same as the Associated Press?

The short answer is that it can't. Factery Labs can't determine the truth value of what it finds, nor will it ever. "It goes beyond any existing technology. And nobody knows how to do that. I mean, I don't even know how to do that--people don't even know how to do that," Pedersen said. "We are absolutely neutral. We have nothing in the system that has any bias in terms of anything. The only mechanism we maintain is egregious spam, the bad guys."

Along with maintaining a blacklist of these bad sites, FacteryLabs also keeps a list of good sources, or ones that continuously deliver. The more often an author successfully recommends a usable page, the faster they'll accumulate rank among the results.

What you can play with today
As for applying that technology to some consumer products, Factery Labs is launching with a handful of development partners, each of which has already built a tool that makes use of FactRank. The most notable one comes from Sobees which is using the service to add relevancy to Twitter and FriendFeed search results--something that's no small feat.

Users can do a search on Sobees' Silverlight-based Twitter client as usual, but there will now be a FactRank button that can sort through those tweets. It does a quick once-over of all of the results, and will filter the most relevant information to the very top. Included in each of its results is also a shortlist of the facts it finds on every page.

One of the first third-party apps to make use of Factery Labs is Sobees, which is adding its fact finding filters and relevancy tools to Twitter and FriendFeed search.

(Credit: Factery Labs)

Advanced users might find more utility in an updated version of Ultimate Info, an extension for Firefox that does a number of things with on-page data. Starting Tuesday, it will let users select links on a page, each of which gets the fact-finding treatment using FactRank.

In our demo, Gaddis used Ultimate Info on the front page of popular site Drudge Report, highlighting about six or seven URLs that were on the page, then running a FactRank query, which brought in its fact results in just a few seconds. As Pedersen explained, users could run something similar on a long article (or several long articles about the same subject), and FactRank's algorithm would be able to provide a fact summary in short order.

Not launching on Tuesday but where the company expects to see the most development is on mobile devices. "Our analysis shows that mobile devices are a prime target for this technology because the latency produces a lot of resistance in the browse experience," said Pedersen. Instead of a user just getting back a link dump of all the URLs it finds, the FactRank engine will go out, process those results, then deliver users with a summary of the best selection of facts--a move that will save the end user from having to wait for any extra pages to load.

If you want to give some of the third party Factery Labs tools a run, you can find them on the company's implementations section. There you'll also find a test search engine that's running off of Twitter's index.

If social gaming is Hollywood, the people aren't as pretty. Well, maybe the avatars are.

Yes, yes, we know that social games are taking over the bloody world: earlier this week, gamemaker Playfish announced its $300 million sale to Electronic Arts, and on Thursday, rival Playdom retorted with the announcement of $43 million in venture funding at a $260 million valuation, and the acquisitions of smaller gaming companies Green Patch (manufacturer of Facebook-based games like Lil Green Patch and Farm Life) and Trippert Labs. Green Patch's games will up Playdom's reach on Facebook by 30 percent, the company said.

Expect to see more of these sales, as smaller developers find they're having trouble treading water in an industry where the big guys--Zynga, Playfish, Playdom--have chomped up most of the market share, and where Facebook, the biggest destination for these games, has shown that it can change the rules at whim. And the big companies, too, want to scramble to get bigger.

Plus, as Playdom co-founder and chairman Rick Thompson explained to CNET News: When gaming companies grow large, they have to deal with a lot of stuff that can get in the way of producing new games and staying on top of consumer trends. That's one reason to keep investing in new talent through acqusitions.

"The hitmakers start spending all their time on operations, and on things that don't improve or enhance the games, and so they become essentially owners and operators," he said. And likewise, "people who can create things shouldn't necessarily be operating a gaming company."

He drew the evolution of a social gaming company parallel to an entertainment studio: "a lot more like Hollywood or the traditional gaming industry" than a Web start-up.

But here's the catch when it comes to acquisitions in this space: Gaming, especially social gaming, is a hit-driven business. If a parent company buys up a hot Facebook game, that game could already be running out of shelf life: which is, indeed, sort of like a Hollywood establishment signing a contract with an actor who's had five hit films in a row, as he could easily be over the hill before long. (Hello, Rob Lowe.)

"I think we're getting pretty good at really looking at their data now, and modeling how these games will evolve over time," Thompson said. "But I think there's essentially a life cycle of growth and then decay. What we really look at in acquisitions is not just daily active users, but bringing on additional team members that can really help create new games in the future."

Google Social Search is ready to surface content created by your friends in regular search results pages.

(Credit: Google)

Google is ready to show off its concept for social search while it figures out what to do with Twitter's fire hose of data.

Last week at the Web 2.0 conference Google's Marissa Mayer demonstrated the service, which will go live as a Google Labs project on Monday. Google Social Search links the concepts of so-called "real-time" search with Google Profiles and custom search results, allowing searchers to find content created by friends or contacts with Google Profiles.

Google Social Search was developed separately without the Twitter deal in mind, said Amit Singal, a Google fellow. The opt-in service provides your Gmail contacts and friends on public social-networking services with the content you've linked to your Google Profile, such as blogs, Twitter or Friendfeed accounts, or any number of published material.

That means that if you've linked your personal blog to your Google Profile, your contacts will be able to see your blog posts related to a given query directly in their search results pages. Those links will be placed at the bottom of the search results page for now, and searchers will also have the option to refine the search results page with a new "social" link on the left-hand side of the page to focus just on content from your network.

Public social-networking content from friends of friends will also be available through this service, with a description of how that person's content is linked to your network appearing within the search result.

SAN FRANCISCO--Google Vice President Marissa Mayer made a surprise announcement at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday: "Social Search," a new Google Labs experiment that will bring in search results from a member's social-network contact circle.

It'll be launching as an opt-in project in the next few weeks. Then, you'll need to have a Google account and set up a Google Profile to fill in information about the social networks that you use. Google first launched Profiles about a year ago.

"What we've done here is inserted, on the bottom of the page, content written by people in your social network," Mayer said, adding that Google hopes this will "really improve the overall relevance, comprehensiveness, and quality" of search results. A search for a local restaurant, for example, could bring up your friends' Yelp reviews for the same establishment. A search for travel destinations could bring up a post from a friend's blog.

This comes on the same day that Google announced that it had entered into an agreement with Twitter to bring real-time "tweets" to search results. That's another product that has yet to actually launch.

"The idea is for...these fast-rising queries, where there's a period of time (when there are) actually tweets about that topic, and the definitive news source hasn't been written yet," Mayer said of the Twitter partnership, declining to disclose its financial terms.

This post was updated at 4:25 p.m. PT.

Gmail's labs section is full of tools that help advanced users fine-tune the interface of the free Web mail service. What may be more impressive, though, are its tweaks for the not-so-advanced users, the kind who need a little hand-holding to keep them from firing off e-mails while intoxicated, or missives that they didn't mean to send in the first place.

To add to these two features, Google on Tuesday introduced "got the wrong Bob?", a very simple tweak that, based on first names, will give you a subtle nudge if it thinks you're sending an e-mail to someone outside of the group you usually correspond with. The alert shows up just above the subject line and asks "Did you mean: ____ instead of ____?" Clicking that link replaces the wrong e-mail address immediately.

Gmail's new labs feature checks to make sure you're sending that e-mail to the correct person if it senses that you typed in the wrong first name.

(Credit: CNET)

In my testing I got it to work pretty well on family and co-workers, although it misfired a few times on groups of friends with whom I had past group e-mailing history. Obviously the more you send to certain people, the better it should get at identifying the ones who don't fit. However, I think most people aren't bound to get into this kind of trouble with Gmail's contact auto-complete suggestions which are quite good. It shows you the person's full name, and their e-mail address, making it difficult to accidentally select the wrong person. Then again, if you're in a rush, mistakes can most definitely happen.

LONDON--Could Twitter Labs prevent drunken tweets like Google Labs hinders drunken e-mails? Here's hoping.

Britt Selvitelle, Twitter's user experience and front end engineering lead, said here Friday that the company will soon launch Twitter Labs. The service will let developers create add-ons and other functions for the microblogging site. Of course, developers can already do this with Twitter's API, but this will make Twitter a formal participant in the process.

Selvitelle announced the project at the Future of Web Apps conference in London. He did not offer many details, but it sounds similar in function to Google Labs. Google Labs, for example, launches every few weeks (or sometimes days) new experimental functions for Gmail. The Undo Send feature, which lets people recall an e-mail within seconds of sending it, is one example.

Will Twitter Labs do the same? One can at least hope. In which case, I will be able to recall Tweets like this.

Oops! Facebook posted this screenshot of a new feature to Twitter and then pulled it.

(Credit: Facebook)

It looks as if Facebook was a little premature in using its Twitter account to announce "Prototypes," a Google Labs-like operation that lets members beta-test new features for the social network and offer feedback.

The tweet offering a screenshot of Prototypes was swiftly deleted--but props to The Next Web for snagging it before it was pulled.

So what are the "prototypes" in question? Facebook seems to be experimenting with desktop notifications, content discovery, and upgrades to its Events invitation service. Next to each test feature is a star-based rating system through which, presumably, users can offer their feedback.

Facebook plans to take the stage at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco early on Tuesday afternoon to make a developer-related announcement. It's pretty likely that this has something to do with it.