Archive for September, 2008

As the AJAX APIs have undergone tremendous growth and adoption, developers have used these APIs in many new and exciting ways. When things move fast, sometimes details get left behind, and our Terms of Service has not been keeping up with the rapid rate of change. We want to make it clear that you can use these APIs in the context of websites, gadgets, mobile apps, desktop client apps, etc. In response to your feedback, we've dusted off and updated the AJAX Search API terms and the AJAX Language API terms. The primary change was replacing "website" with "Property" that's defined as a "website, application, or other product".

As always, thank you for the feedback. Keep your comments and suggestions coming! We look forward to all of your amazing creations using the Google AJAX APIs.

Here in Google Desktop land, we value two things: 1) feedback from people who use Google Desktop and 2) chocolate malt balls (good to eat, good to throw). While we love hearing how much you enjoy Google Desktop, we also want to know what we can do better. 

  posted by Dharmesh

Greetings Messenger fans –

One of the benefits of working at a place like Microsoft is that there are all sorts of teams working on cool technology that we get to share with each other.  Messenger just benefited from such a group within Microsoft Research that focuses on translation technologies.  Which is great for a person like me that has friends who speak another language - especially since I often need help remembering translations.

If you want to interact with the new translator agent, just click here or add mtbot@hotmail.com to your contact list and start chatting. You can have one-on-one conversations with the bot where it will respond with the translation.  Or you can invite a friend and each chat in a different language with the bot translating between you. 

Today, the bot can translate:

• English to/from:
  • Arabic
  • Chinese Simplified
  • Chinese Traditional
  • Dutch
  • French
  • German
  • Italian
  • Japanese
  • Korean
  • Portuguese
  • Russian (Russian --> English only)
  • Spanish
• Chinese Simplified <-> Chinese Traditional

The team will continue to add more languages over the next several months.  So if you're looking for a particular language / translation, definitely let us know.

And for another cool use of the same technology, check this out: http://www.windowslivetranslator.com. 

Posted by Steve Gerding, Software Engineer

One of our favorite aspects of TV view is that it provides an uninterrupted viewing experience. You can browse through multiple results pages and sort, filter or refine your search - all without interrupting the video you're watching. Videos need to be playable on Google Video in order to provide this seamless experience, and while most videos are, some are not. In order to make it easier to identify playable videos, these videos are marked with the playable icon as shown below:

Videos that cannot be played directly in the TV view can still be watched by following the link to the original hosting site. If you want to see only videos that are playable on Google Video in your search results, you can restrict your search to playable videos using the radio buttons under the search box:

We hope this new feature enhances your video search and viewing experience on Google Video. If you are a webmaster and would like your videos to be playable on Google Video, check out our Video Sitemaps Help Center.