Archive for August, 2009

by Claudine Zap

Hip-hop megastar Jay-Z has set the Web on fire with his new album, Blueprint 3. That was the plan, but not quite this early.

A few songs from the upcoming record have leaked online, sending searches soaring for "blueprint 3 leak." Yahoo! lookups for "jay z blueprint 3" have also been bumping up all week. 

While some of the rapper's tracks got out early, fans can rest assured they will get the whole album online on September 1, for free. MTV's "The Leak" and Rhapsody, the digital entertainment site, have teamed up to stream the record a good ten days before the release date.

On Sept. 11, the day the album goes on sale in stores, the New York native will give a concert for charity at Madison Square Garden to support the New York Police and Fire Widows' and Children's Benefit Fund. The rapper appeared with a grateful Gov. Paterson, the fire commissioner, and the New York borough president to promote the show, which must have been a first.

One blogger who heard the unauthorized leaks called the tunes "dope." You can decide for yourself, soon enough.

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by Vera H-C Chan

The hot days of August became days of mourning for political leaders (Cory Aquino, Kim Dae-Jung, Ted Kennedy). Health conversations took on an unhealthy tone, and reality TV dominated real-life crime headlines. Below, a look at searches and buzzy stories on Yahoo! this month.

The Last Days of Camelot
While June's celebrity departures seemed a turning point for Generation X, the loss of two political paladins marked an era's passing. The legacy of America's most well-known political family came under review twice with the deaths of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who founded the Special Olympics, and brother Edward Kennedy. Dogged by the Chappaquidick incident, the Massachusetts senator abandoned presidential ambition but still shaped everyday American life by helping to create nearly 1,000 laws on health, civil rights, disability, immigration, education, and more. 

Health Check-Up's Negative Results
High decibel levels and superheated rhetoric complicated the already unwieldy mission to reform health care. Rifle-toting protesters and outright falsehoods made town-hall meetings look like a Jerry Springer episode. Still, online outreach—including details from the White House—and research into "obama health plan details" persisted. Meanwhile, more immediate health concerns pushed up queries for flu shots.

Reality Checks
The normally escapist fare of reality TV took an awful turn with a murder-suicide. The VH1 series "Megan Wants a Millionaire" had finished filming and aired only two episodes when news came out that a finalist, Ryan Jenkins, had allegedly killed his wife and swimsuit model, Jasmine Fiore. His suicide three days later led VH1 to cancel that show, as well as celebreality show "I Love Money 3," which Jenkins had competed and won.

 

Search Terms with the Biggest Percentage Changes DJ AM (breakout). The celebrity spinner and Travis Barker drummer was found dead at age 26, possibly of a cocaine overdose. Jasmine Fiore (breakout). See above. Scott Disick (36,648%). Father of Kourtney Kardashian's baby, due later this year. Dominick Dunne (+22,632%). Forceful literary voice who covered crime amongst the elite died at 83 Jane Leeves (+27,726%). Kelsey Grammer's new fall show bestirred "Frasier" fans to check up on his old costar. Big Brother 11 Spoiler (+19,301%). The CBS show is in the throes of its 11th season. Kennedy Family (+19,001%). See above. Edward Kennedy (+18,440%). See above. Miss Venezuela (+16,665%). The latest Miss Universe. UFC 102 (+13,435%). Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira beat out Randy Couture.

Biggest Search Terms Michael Jackson Cash for Clunkers 2009 Vanessa Hudgens Miley Cyrus Britney Spears Beyonce Megan Fox Lady GaGa Jessica Alba Kim Kardashian

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by Mike Krumboltz

She's long since moved out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but inquiring minds still want to know: "What's new with Chelsea Clinton?" Searches on the former first daughter remain impressively high — Ms. Clinton consistently draws more lookups than Hollywood A-listers like Jennifer Garner and Tom Cruise, not to mention her dear ol' dad.

This past weekend, as news hit that Jenna Bush would start corresponding for NBC's "Today Show," queries on Chelsea posted a jump. In fact, they did more than jump — searches surged a whopping 584% in a single day.

A big part of that surge has to be attributed to long-standing wedding rumors. Though the Clintons deny it, the New York Post reports that wedding preparations may well be heating up on Martha's Vineyard. From the Post: "A Post reporter yesterday spotted preparations in full gear for a very large gathering on Chappaquiddick Island."

Fact or fiction, the rumors have had an effect on search — lookups on "chelsea clinton wedding" are on the rise, and queries for Chelsea's boyfriend, Marc Mezvinsky, are also heating up. 

But what is Ms. Clinton doing with her time and considerable talents? According to various blogs including the Huffington Post, Clinton is currently enrolled at Columbia University's Mailman School for Public Health, earning a graduate degree. Whether or not a wedding is in her immediate future is really anybody's guess.  

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Imagine that we're launching a brand new advertising campaign for our new e-commerce website that sells Empanadas, my favorite food. The structure of the website is simple. We have a homepage, a few category pages that lists empanadas by type (baked, fried, etc), and hundreds of individual pages for each type of empanada (ham and cheese, steak, chicken, veggie, etc.).




Posted by Gabriel Francis, Google Analytics Team

by Claudine Zap

Our top picks from the day's hottest searches.

1. Nummi (Searches increased by 1,532%). The Toyota plant in California's Bay Area is being shut down, idling almost 5,000 workers.
2. Kim Cattrall (+577%). The "Sex and the City" star appeared on the British show "Who Do You Think You Are?" and learned about her grandfather's secret life, or should we say, wife.
3. Princess Diana (+143%). The "people's princess" died 12 years ago.
4. Map of L.A. fires (+121%). The four wildfires can be seen from space.
5. First day of school activities (+131%). New outfit? Check. School supplies? Check. Cool lunch box? You're set.

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There’s a time for everything in life: a time for playing, learning & growing up; a time for maturing, working & performing, and a time for retiring, relaxing & handing the reigns over to the next generation. This is true for products too, and this is why, six months ago, we announced our Labs program for Google Code. This program provides clear distinction between graduate developer products where you’ll find mature products with transparent deprecation policies which you can count on for the long run, and labs developer products where you can explore our newest products and get started with them early.

As we also said in that announcement, the time has come for the SOAP Search API to retire – the new generation is around, has graduated, and has largely taken over already as a better and more versatile solution for the vast majority of use cases. In the spirit of our deprecation policies, we’ve continued to support the SOAP Search API since its deprecation in 2006, but we wanted to remind you that it is finally sunsetting. That had been planned for today, but we thought we'd give the few of you still using it another week to be prepared, so we'll be shutting it down on September 7th instead.

By Eric Tholomé, Director, Developer Products

Last weekend around 30 developers came to the Mediapark in Cologne, Germany to learn about building mobile widgets using the W3C widgets standard.

Vodafone had invited us to the Summer of Widgets (German), a hack event to promote both the standard and their widget platform. The event got additional support from Amazon, Widgetlabs, and the Yahoo Developer Network.

The W3C widget standard is nothing ground-breaking, but it is great to see that you can build small applications for mobile devices simply by using standards we have used for years: HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. If you want to get a thorough idea of how to build your first widget, check out Peter-Paul Koch's introduction on W3C widgets.

During the event, Peter-Paul told the attendees what widget development is about, the hackers got access to the developer SDK from Vodafone and a preview of a new service on the web that gives you access to dozens of handsets for testing via a web interface.

My job at the Summer of Widgets was to introduce the developers to the idea of mashups and point them to data sources on the web they can use. For this I was explicitly asked to show off the Yahoo APIs but I thought it better to explain and show all kind of APIs and how easy it is to mix and match them by using YQL. This went down both as a treat and a shock to the attendees. Many of the hackers left feeling much more empowered to tap into the web of data than before their introduction to YQL.

By way of a demo, I created a small translation widget using the Vodafone
widget SDK and the Google translation API with the YQL open table for Google Translate. You can get the source code of the widget on GitHub and you can see it in action by clicking the ".wgt" file in the dist folder an opening it in Opera. Here's a screen shot of what you'll be able to see and do:

If you check the code you'll find out that the whole thing is done in about 20 lines of JavaScript, as YQL does most of the work for us.

All in all it was a great event, and it was nice to see that people feel empowered when they can use technologies they've been using for years to reach new markets and devices. The only problem I see with the W3C widget approach to mobile development is that to date you can't do the things that make mobile development interesting: access the location services of the phone, detect phone movement, and access the camera or the address books. There is work being done on these capabilities though and once we can reach the goodies, the sky is the limit.

Chris Heilmann (@codepo8)
Yahoo Developer Network

We recently shared an update on the Google Apps Blog about new features in Google Sites, the web creation and publishing application included in Google Apps. The new features let you copy your site, use more options to search, and more easily announce updates. Since these features are useful for anyone who uses Google Sites as part of the Google Apps Premier or Education editions, we wanted to make it easy for you to read about the features.

Posted by Ellen Leanse, Google Enterprise team

Get timely updates on new features in Google Apps by subscribing to our RSS feed or email alerts.

We spend a lot of time thinking about how information travels around the globe. After all, there are Googlers living and working in dozens of countries — and we're pretty sure our products are used in many more. So we're familiar with the need to translate information across borders, and we've been working hard to build the technology to enable you to do just that. Today, we're excited to announce that we've added nine new languages to Google Translate: Afrikaans, Belarusian, Icelandic, Irish, Macedonian, Malay, Swahili, Welsh and Yiddish. That means that Google Translate now supports 51 languages and 2550 language pairs — including all 23 official EU languages.

The translation quality of these newest languages is still a little rough, but it will improve over time — and we're continuously working to improve quality for all languages supported by Google Translate. We're also working to integrate Google Translate into some of our other products; you can already translate emails within Gmail, webpages using Google Toolbar, RSS feeds in Google Reader and most recently, documents within Google Docs. For more information about Google Translate and these latest additions, check out our post on the Research Blog.

Posted by Jeff Chin, Product Manager

Posted by Franz Och, Principal Scientist

Are you using Google Translate to access the world's information? It can help you find and translate local restaurant and hotel reviews into your language when planning a vacation abroad, allow you to read the Spanish or French Editions of Google News, communicate with people who speak different languages using Google Translate chat bots, and more. We're constantly working to improve translation quality, so if you haven't tried it recently, you may be pleasantly surprised with what it can do now.

We're especially excited to announce that we've added 9 new languages to Google Translate: Afrikaans, Belarusian, Icelandic, Irish, Macedonian, Malay, Swahili, Welsh, and Yiddish, bringing the number of languages we support from 42 to 51. Since we can translate between any two of these languages, we offer translation for 2550 language pairs!

How do we decide which languages to add to Google Translate? Our goal is to provide automatic translation for as many languages as possible. So internally we've been collecting data and building systems for more than 100 languages. Whenever a set of languages meets our quality bar we consider it for our next language launch. We've found that one of the most important factors in adding new languages to our system is the ability to find large amounts of translated documents from which our system automatically learns how to translate. As a result, the set of languages that we've been able to develop is more closely tied to the size of the web presence of a language and less to the number of speakers of the language.

We're very happy that our technology allows us to produce machine translation systems for languages that often don't get the attention they deserve. For many of the newly supported languages ours is the only mature and freely available translation system. While translation quality in these languages will be noticeably rougher than for languages we've supported for a longer time like French or Spanish, it is most often good enough to give a basic understanding of the text, and you can be sure that the quality will get better over time.

Remember, you can also use Google Translate from inside other Google products. For example you can translate e-mails within GMail, translate web pages using Google Toolbar, translate RSS news feeds from around the world in Google Reader, and translate documents in Google Docs. (The new languages aren't available in these products yet but will be soon!) And, if you're translating content into other languages, you can use our technology within Google Translator Toolkit to help you translate faster and better. In the future, expect to find our translation technology in more places, making it increasingly simple to get access to information no matter what language it is written in.