Posts Tagged ‘google’

Google News added a feature that could encourage users to read more: collectible badges. “The U.S. Edition of Google News now lets you collect private, sharable badges for your favorite topics. The more articles you read on Google News, the more your badges level up: you can reach Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and finally Ultimate. Keep your badges to yourself, or show them off to your friends,” informs Google.

While this feature could encourage users to visit Google News more often, the main purpose is to find people that know a lot of things about certain topics. “Your badges are private by default, but if you want, you can share your badges with your friends. Tell them about your news interests, display your expertise, start a conversation or just plain brag about how well-read you are,” suggests Google.

Instead of manually adding your favorite topics to your profile, you could add Google News badges. It’s one way to show your expertise and it could be useful if Google plans to integrate Aardvark with Google+ and launch a social Q&A service.

You can read the whole blog entry at http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/07/google-news-badges.html

This week at Google I/O, Google is making the Google Prediction API generally available. One really interesting feature is the automatic flagging of content.

The Google Prediction API can be used by almost any app to recommend the useful, extract the essential, and automate the repetitive. For example:

• Recommend a new movie to a customer.
• Identify most important customers.
• Automatically tag posts with relevant flags.

For example, Ford Motor Co. Research is working to use the Prediction API to optimize plug-in hybrid vehicle fuel efficiency by optionally providing users with likely destinations to choose from, and soon, optimizing driving controls to conserve fuel. Because the API is a cloud-hosted RESTful service, Ford has been able to access its computationally-intensive machine learning algorithms to find patterns that rank potential destinations based on previous driving paths. Ford will be demonstrating their work at the API’s I/O Session.

For more info see:

http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2011/05/google-prediction-api-helps-all-apps-to.html

Traditional trivia games have a rule that you can’t cheat—you can’t look things up in books, you can’t ask your friends and you certainly can’t ask Google. But what if there were a trivia game where you could not only ask Google, but were encouraged to do so? Imagine how difficult the questions would need to be with the power of the world’s information at your fingertips.

A Google a Day is a new daily puzzle that can be solved using your creativity and clever search skills on Google. Questions will be posted every day on agoogleaday.com and printed on weekdays above the New York Times crossword puzzle. We’ll reveal each puzzle’s answer the next day in the Times and on agoogleaday.com, along with the search tips and features used to find it.

You can read the whole blog entry at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/trivia-game-where-using-google-is.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FMKuf+%28Official+Google+Blog%29

Google sidewiki is an extension for the Google Toolbar allowing users to post annotations on a website. Annotations will be available for everyone entering the site.

To create annotations users need a Google account, being able to annotate the whole Web page or portions of it.

The current version of Google sidewiki allow users:

• To keep track of the comments they have already read.
• To value other’s annotations as useful or not.
• To share annotations via link, email, Twitter and Facebook.
• To access all the annotations created by any user.

Once installed from http://www.google.com/sidewiki/intl/en/index.html, you can visit http://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/prevention.htm to see Google sidewiki in action.