Archive for June, 2008

Posted by Kun Zhang, Software Engineer

The Google Video team continually strives to make your video search experience more enjoyable. In an effort to do so, we have added a suggestions feature to help you discover more interesting videos. Sometimes the suggestions expand the scope of your search, and sometimes they make your search more specific--it all depends on what you searched for and which suggestion you click on.

To view your search suggestions, click on the "Also try" links on top of the search results to refine or expand your search.


For example, if you are searching for "kittens", you may see suggestions like "cute kittens", "funny kittens", "newborn kittens", "techno kittens", "treadmill kittens" and so on. Clicking on these suggested search terms will lead you to the respective search results page, and another set of suggestions. If you continue following through these suggestion links, your first search may very well turn into hours of exploration.

The suggestions feature is available across all views - TV view, Grid view and List view. We hope that these suggested search terms will add a few different flavors to your search experience.

The philosophy for the Google Talk team is to enable real time communication where and how people need it, across different platforms, devices, and operating systems. Towards these goals, we have made Google Talk available through web interfaces like Gmail chat and the Google Talk gadget, as well as directly from the desktop through our own downloadable client and via many XMPP clients. We have faced some challenges in keeping the capabilities for each of these versions of Google Talk up to date, and we have heard your feedback on striving towards more feature parity across all versions.

While recently we have spent more time on web integration scenarios, we have also been developing a new client that allows our downloadable and web versions of Google Talk to move forward together more quickly. The Google Talk, Labs Edition release is a sneak peek into this work. Of note in this Labs Edition release is its use of the open source Webkit engine to host the Google Talk gadget. We've used Webkit to bring the Talk gadget out of your browser, and onto your desktop, able to run in the Taskbar. Google Talk, Labs Edition combines “downloadable client behavior”, like stacking notifications and displaying presence outside the browser, with nearly all of the web behaviors of the Google Talk gadget, such as emoticons, multi-user chat, tabbed conversations, etc. It can also natively display web notifications from multiple sources, such as Gmail and calendar alerts and Orkut scrap changes. A few weeks ago we added invisible mode to the Google Talk Gadget, and this functionality immediately extended to Google Talk Labs Edition.

Google Talk, Labs Edition is a first step towards a more unified experience whether you're using Talk through the web or on the desktop. Some of our savvy users may already appreciate the advantages of this approach, and we are confident that the continued improvements being made will translate into a better Google Talk experience for all our users.

Chee Chew
Engineering Director

To ease navigation and be more in synch with our security colleagues within Microsoft, we have moved to a new blog address: http://blogs.technet.com/mmpc

We hope you like the new look. Please remember to redirect any links to our new web address.

posted by Aaron

Hey Messenger users, Aaron here. We are seeing an issue where Messenger versions 8.1 and 8.5 are experiencing a technical issue that is causing a blank white box to appear in the conversation window. If you are the 9.0 beta you might be seeing an Office Logo. Believe it or not this is the same bug. The issue does not impact your ability to send and receive messages. We apologize for the inconvenience and are working hard behind the scenes to lose the box and the logo. Hang tight, it should be back to normal before you know it!

My.Live.com Team

A little over a month ago, we announced our beta for Firefox 3 and encouraged you to try it out. After hundreds of thousands of downloads, you gave us some great feedback on how we could make it better and more stable. We’ve incorporated many fixes and refinements into the final release, and we’ve got a plan to release more features on a regular basis. Thanks again to everyone who participated in our beta; we really couldn’t have gotten here without you.

For a complete list of new features, check out our blog post announcing the beta; it covers all the basics.

For those of you who haven’t used our Firefox extension, it’s a great way to search and manage your bookmarks as well as keep track of your Delicious network and links for you. And if you’re still using Firefox 2, the new extension works perfectly with that browser as well. If you already use our existing extension, you’ll get a reminder to upgrade when you start Firefox. If you’re new to the extension, check it out on Mozilla’s add-on page.

Nick Nguyen
Senior Product Manager, del.icio.us

Amit Papnai
Principal Engineer, del.icio.us Extension Team

Sibil Mohammed
Senior Software Engineer (Firefox Extension)

Vivekanand Bolajwar
Senior Web Developer (Firefox Extension)

Sanjay Kumar
del.icio.us Extension Team QA

Now that Windows Server 2008 has been released earlier this year many enterprises are assessing the value proposition of moving to the Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7.0. As an IT Pro or decision maker in this process you want real world working proof to...(read more)

It wouldn't be a British Summer Party if it didn't rain.

I was glad so many people braved the weather to attend the Flag and Bell Summer Party on board the Queen Mary and The Yacht Club ships along Victoria Embankment on Tuesday night. Thanks for coming along.

Congratulations to the 'Mary's Queens' team for achieving a perfect score on the quiz this month. This is a Flag and Bell first. Well done to Rima, Matt and Peter.

Thanks again to PCR Recruitment for sponsoring drinks at the first bar. Details for the event on the 1st of July coming soon.

Posted by Ken Harrenstien, Software Engineer

Those of you interested in closed captioning may have noticed a new feature on this front- the ability to search only for closed-captioned videos. Naturally this is very useful for people like myself who can't hear the audio, but of course there are many others who either want the sound off or who can understand the writing better than the speech.

If you go to the "Advanced Video Search" page you'll see a new constraint called "Subtitles: Search only closed captioned videos". Try clicking on that check-box and doing an otherwise normal search; the results will include those videos that are known to have captions. Fun example: to see a list of all captioned videos on Google Video, check that box and restrict the domain to "google.com".

It's still not quite as sophisticated as we want it to be - it currently only knows about videos in Google Video, and doesn't yet allow you to specify a language of interest. Nevertheless it's another small step that we hope will encourage greater awareness and use of captions.

A related feature of interest that you may not have noticed is the ability to jump directly into a video at the point where captions of interest appear. If your search results include caption snippets, there will be a link called "Start playing at search term", which is extremely handy for long videos. In order to see it, you also have to select "List View" (the middle icon in the Results menu bar).

Here's a nice example - search for ["that's a tremendous gift"] . Make sure you've selected List View, and you should see a video featuring Randy Pausch. Clicking on the "Start playing at search term (50:16)" link will take you to a point slightly before the appearance of that caption.

Back in December, we released translation bots for Google Talk. While machine translation isn't 100% accurate, the idea of reducing language barriers with automated chat translations appealed to many people, and we received a lot of positive feedback. So when Google Translate recently added new languages, we decided to create chat bots for these languages.

The new bots speak Bulgarian (bg), Croatian (hr), Czech (cs), Danish (da), Finnish (fi), Hindi (hi), Norwegian (no), Polish (pl), Portuguese (pt), Romanian (ro), Swedish (sv) and Traditional Chinese (zh-hant).

There are 26 new bots: bg2en, cs2en, da2en, en2bg, en2cs, en2da, en2fi, en2hi, en2hr, en2no, en2pl, en2pt, en2ro, en2sv, en2zh-hant, fi2en, hi2en, hr2en, no2en, pl2en, pt2en, ro2en, sv2en, zh-hant2en, zh-hant2zh, zh2zh-hant. For reference you can also check out the full list of supported language combinations. To add one of these bots to your contacts, remember to use the following format [from language]2[to language]@bot.talk.google.com.

Toivon, että pidät siitä!

For those that don't know Finnish...



Jonas Lindberg
Software Engineer