Using search patterns to track dengue fever

What does baseball have in frequent with gazebos? We’re not sure, except for that people search on Google for both terms in similar patterns. Last week we introduced Google Correlate, an experimental tool enabling researchers to model real-world performance using search trends. We’ve heard from many researchers who want to mine this data for new discoveries about economics and public health—much like we planned Google Flu Trends to give an early warning about flu outbreaks. We hope they’re able to make useful discoveries with Google associate.

While building Google Correlate, we used it to create an early warning system for another significant disease. Google Dengue Trends in Bolivia, Brazil, India, Indonesia and Singapore provides an extra surveillance tool for a disease that affects about 100 million people each year. Dengue is a virus spread through mosquito bites that creates symptoms counting high fever, severe headache and pain, rash and mild bleeding. There is no vaccine or treatment, so public health efforts are mainly focused on helping people take steps to prevent being infected with the disease.

Singapore has an remarkably timely surveillance system for dengue, but in many countries it can take weeks or months for dengue case data to be collected, analyzed and made available. During the dengue outbreak at last year’s Commonwealth Games, we discussed the need for timely dengue information. With help from Professor John Brownstein and Emily Chan from HealthMap, a program at Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School, we were able to generate our system. Using the dengue case count data provided by Ministries of Health and the World Health Organization, we’re able to build a model that offers near real-time estimates of dengue action based on the popularity of certain search terms. Google Dengue Trends is automatically rationalized every day, thereby providing an early indicator of dengue activity.

The methodology for this system is the same as that for Google Flu Trends and is outlined in a newly published article in PLoS disused Tropical Diseases.

We hope the early warning provided by Google Dengue Trends helps health officials and the public arrange for potential dengue outbreaks. For those who live in places where dengue is present, remember to go after the advice of health officials to prevent infection by wearing mosquito revolting and emptying any containers that lure mosquito larvae by meeting standing water.

Our 2011 EMEA Faculty Summit

Earlier this month, we held our fourth Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) Faculty peak at our Zurich office, Google’s largest engineering center in the region. This was EMEA’s biggest Faculty Summit to date, with some of EMEA’s foremost computer science academics (103, to be exact) from 73 universities on behalf of 28 countries, plus more than 60 Googlers in attendance. Over the course of three days, participants chose from 48 different sessions, technical streams and tech talks (given by both Googlers and academics) that enclosed a variety of computer science topics including privacy, software engineering and usual language processing.

The Faculty Summit is a chance for us to meet with computer science academics to talk about operations, regional projects and ways we can join forces via our our university programs. These programs comprise our Focused Research Awards, which, to date, are nearing €3.7 million with recent awards in Europe given to researchers exploring privacy, fact discovery, test amplification, optimization and security, among other topics. We also have an academic research plan to understand market algorithms and auctions, the Google European Doctoral Fellowship and the all-purpose research awards program.

This year’s jam-packed agenda incorporated a welcome address by Yossi Matias, senior director and head of Google’s Israel Research and Development Center, covering Google’s engineering activity and new innovations in EMEA; a presentation by Alfred Spector, vice president of research and special initiatives, on our advance to research and innovation; and a presentation by Nelson Mattos, vice president of EMEA product and engineering, on exciting developments and opportunities in Africa and the Middle East. David Konerding presented Google’s Exacycle for Visiting Faculty, a grant program for high-performance, CPU-intensive computing where we’ll award up to 10 capable researchers with at least 100 million computing core-hours each, for a total of 1 billion core-hours. Professor Claudia Eckert, a guest visiting from the Technical University of Munich, gave an insightful appearance on security, privacy and the future of the internet.

We also held one-on-one break-out sessions where academics and Googlers could meet confidentially and discuss topics of personal interest, such as how to expand a well-constructed research award proposal, how to apply for a sabbatical at Google or how to gain Google support for a discussion in a applicable research area.

The Summit provides a great opportunity to build and make stronger research and academic collaborations. Our hope is to drive technology forward by fostering equally beneficial relationships with our academic colleagues and their universities.

Stay tuned for more facts about the North America Faculty Summit in New York, July 13-15.

Coming soon: make your phone your wallet

Today in our New York City office, along with Citi, MasterCard, First Data and Sprint, we gave a demonstration of Google Wallet, an app that will make your phone your wallet. You’ll be able to tap, pay and save using your phone and near field communication (NFC). We’re field difficult Google Wallet now and plan to release it soon.

Google Wallet is a key part of our ongoing effort to get better shopping for both businesses and consumers. It’s aimed at making it easier for you to pay for and save on the goods you want, while giving merchants more ways to offer coupons and devotion programs to customers, as well as bridging the gap between online and offline commerce.

Because Google Wallet is a mobile app, it will do more than a usual wallet ever could. You'll be able to store your credit cards, offers, loyalty cards and gift cards, but without the bulk. When you tap to pay, your phone will also routinely redeem offers and earn loyalty points for you. Someday, even things like boarding passes, tickets, ID and keys could be stored in Google Wallet.

At first, Google Wallet will hold both Citi MasterCard and a Google Prepaid Card, which you’ll be able to fund with roughly any payment card. From the outset, you’ll be able to tap your phone to pay wherever MasterCard PayPass is accepted. Google Wallet will also sync your Google Offers, which you’ll be able to redeem via NFC at participating SingleTap™ merchants, or by performance the barcode as you check out. Many merchants are working to put together their offers and loyalty programs with Google Wallet.

With Google Wallet, we’re building an open commerce ecosystem, and we’re setting up to develop APIs that will enable addition with numerous partners. In the beginning, Google Wallet will be well-suited with Nexus S 4G by Google, available on Sprint. Over time, we plan on growing support to more phones.

This is just the start of what has already been a great exploit towards the future of mobile shopping. We’re extremely excited and hope you are, too.

Inside the Big Tent

At our European Zeitgeist event, held yearly near London, we usually erect a large marquee for a partner dinner and entertainment. This year we wondered if there was something else we could do with the space once Zeitgeist was over. In that instant, the Big Tent was born.

Canvas aside, the term "big tent" has, of course, a political connotation. Wikipedia defines it as "seeking to draw people with diverse viewpoints...does not need adherence to some ideology as a criterion for membership." That just about sums up the idea at the back last week’s Big Tent conference, which focused on debating some of the hot issues linking to the internet and society.

We invited the advocacy groups Privacy International and Index on Censorship—both of whom have criticised Google in the past—to partner with us in staging the debates, and wanted diverse viewpoints among the speakers and the delegates.

Topics on the agenda included: what was the role of technology in the revolutions in the Middle East? What are the limits of free speech online? Do we need tougher privacy laws or are we in danger of stifling innovation? Can technology and access to in order be used to help prevent conflict?

The result was a motivating day of debate featuring the likes of Big Brother television producer Peter Bazalgette, Mumsnet founder Justine Roberts and the U.K. Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt alongside Googlers including Eric Schmidt, Google Ideas’ Jared Cohen and the Egyptian activist Wael Ghonim, and a highly occupied and knowledgeable audience of NGOs, policy advisers, tech businesses and journalists.

You can watch highlights on YouTube and see happening feedback on Twitter. We hope to bring the Big Tent to other regions over the coming year.

No More Offline Gmail in Google Chrome

Chrome 12, the upcoming version of Google's browser which is likely to be free today, removes a useful feature: the built-in Gears plugin. While most Google services dropped support for Gears and detached offline way in, Gears is still being used in Gmail. Google no longer maintains Gears, which is now legacy software, and focuses on implementing offline hold up using HTML5.

But why remove Gears hold up without implementing the features using HTML5 first? Google says that you'll only need to wait for a few weeks or you can still older versions of Firefox, Internet Explorer and mail client such as Thunderbird or Outlook.

"The new Gmail Offline ability is targeted for delivery as a Chrome browser web app this summer. As we move the Gmail Offline capability to a Chrome web app, we will denounce the Google Gears-based Gmail Offline. This coincides with the version 12 release of the Google Chrome browser which no longer supports Gears. As a result, Google Gears-based Gmail Offline will no longer work with the Chrome browser as of Tuesday May 24, 2011. Google Gears-based Gmail Offline will carry on to work in Internet Explorer 8 and Mozilla Firefox 3.6," explains Google.

It's not the best thing to do after believable users to switch to Chrome and use Web apps, but it's just a temporary issue. If the HTML5 offline Gmail wasn't ready to be free, removing Gears from Chrome could have been delayed.

Music Album Filtering in Google Video

Google started to learn more about music. After civilizing the Web search results for music videos by adding metadata, Google additional the same enhancements to Google Video. Now you can even find a list of popular albums when you search for an artist. Select one of the albums and you'll limit the results to the songs from the album. The nice thing is that Google's algorithms make sure that the results are varied and songs aren't frequent too often.

“I don't think the marbles will be as bad as people fear, because they be liable to occur at the exits of high-speed corners, and Monaco is generally quite a low-speed track, so I don't think we'll see the build-up that we saw at somewhere like Turkey's Turn Eight, for example.

“I'm previously looking forward to it.”

How Google Docs Killed GDrive

"In The Plex", Steven Levy's recently launched book about Google, has an attractive story about GDrive, an online storage service urbanized by Google. People first found about GDrive from a leaked Google document, back in 2006. GDrive (or Platypus) turned out to be a service used by Google employees that offered many imposing features: syncing files, viewing files on the Web, shared spaces for collaborating on a document, offline access, local IO speeds. But Google required to launch GDrive for everyone.

At the time [2008], Google was about to launch a project it had been mounting for more than a year, a free cloud-based storage service called GDrive. But Sundar [Pichai] had finished that it was an artifact of the style of computing that Google was about to usher out the door. He went to Bradley Horowitz, the executive in charge of the project, and said, "I don't think we need GDrive anymore." Horowitz asked why not. "Files are so 1990," said Pichai. "I don't think we need files anymore."

Horowitz was stunned. "Not need files anymore?"

"Think about it," said Pichai. "You just want to get in order into the cloud. When people use our Google Docs, there are no more files. You just start restriction in the cloud, and there's never a file."

When Pichai first proposed this concept to Google's top executives at a GPS—no files!—the reaction was, he says, "skeptical." [Linus] Upson had one more characterization: "It was a withering assault." But finally they won people over by a logical argument—that it could be done, that it was the cloudlike thing to do, that it was the Google thing to do. That was the end of GDrive: shuttered as a relic of obsolete thinking even before Google released it. The engineers operational on it went to the Chrome team.

In 2009, Google Docs in progress to store PDF files and one year later you could store any type of file in Google Docs. The service still doesn't offer a way to sync files. Even if GDrive was never released, Google Docs inherits most of its features. The main difference is that you no longer have to be troubled about file formats because you can open and edit documents in Google Docs.

Google Business Profiles?

The source code of the Google Profiles page includes a broken link that has a enlightening anchor text: "business profiles". The link sends you to a page that doesn't exist: http://www.google.com/_/managepages, but this characteristic could add Google Profiles to Google Apps and allow users to create multiple profile pages.

Another interesting thing is that Google has a new subdomain: https://plusone.google.com, which redirects to Google Profiles. There's already a Web page about the +1 button, so it's not clear why Google has a new address for Google +1. Maybe profiles will be a characteristic of Google +1.

Google Maps OneBox Outlines

Google's OneBox displayed when you look for for the name of a country, a city or a zip code got smarter. Google added an sketch around the location you want to find, so the map is even more useful. For example, try probing for [Bronx], [Detroit 48238], [Baku], [Paraguay map].

Chris, a reader of this blog, says that he used CityData before noticing the new Google feature. While CityData is only helpful for the US, the Google Maps OneBox is displayed for almost any city in the world.

Bringing Google Apps educators jointly through regional user groups

From grading math quizzes with Google forms to plotting plant growth in a motion chart, teachers around the world are continually generating new, creative ways Google Apps can improve instruction.

To make it easier for educators to share great ideas away from their school walls, we’re introducing eight Google Apps Regional K-12 User Groups across the U.S. and Canada. These groups will enable educators and administrators to learn from one another and work together through community discussion forums, shared resources, events and webinars.

If you’re an educator involved in sharing and learning new ways to use Apps in your classroom, visit the Enterprise Blog for more information and to sign up.

Gmail's New Ad System

I've previously reported about Gmail's experiments with image ads and modified ads, but it seems that these tests are two pieces from a puzzle: a new ad-matching system for Gmail.

New York Times reports that the new algorithms try to find better ads. "Alex Gawley, Google's senior product manager overseeing Gmail, (...) said Gmail's revamped ad-matching system, now in incomplete tests, analyzes context as well as the content of an person message. It looks at what he calls 'signals in your inbox,' like whether you open messages with particular keywords and don't open those with other keywords."

Gmail will also include static image ads. "For example, an e-mailed offer for a ski package showing a skier on the slopes could be accompanied by an ad on the right side of the screen, showing a rival offer, replete with another skier coming down another slope. Mr. Gawley said the image used in the ad would be static, not animated, and would be used only in cases where the e-mail message itself showed images."

Gmail's new ads will still be connected to your messages, but Google will add other signals that will make the ads an addition of your inbox. Just like Google shows small images ads next to images search results and uses your preferences to personalize ads, Gmail's contextual ads will get better using more data.

As long as the ads are relevant, reasonably useful and they aren't distracting, Google is still on the right track. It might take a while to get used to the image ads, but the ad displayed below the messages and the list of messages will be the most obnoxious. "Gmail presents a single text ad when you look at an inbox view and haven't chosen a particular message," according to the New York Times.

A New Interface for Google News: No Clusters, No Clutter

Google News has a redesigned interface that tries to remove the visual clutter and make multimedia satisfied more discoverable. All Google News clusters are collapsed by default, except for the top news story. Clusters include more links, a special section for images and videos, but you have to physically expand them.

"The newly stretchy stories on Google News in the U.S., released today, give you greater story diversity with less clutter. Now you can easily see more content, see less of what you don't use and have a more streamlined skill," explains Google.

By default, Google uses the single feature view, but you can switch to the two column view with the extra benefit of going back to the old interface. Here's the new interface:

... and the classic interface:

The redesigned UI shows a single news article in its place of a group of related articles. Although the cluster is still available, it's strange to see that Google hides one of the main features of Google News: grouping articles about the same topic. As Krishna Bharat, the creator of Google News, has recently said, the service "groups news articles by story, thus as long as visual structure and giving users access to diverse perspectives from around the world in one place".

Power users can try Google's keyboard shortcuts (j/k for navigating to the next/previous story, o/u for expanding/collapsing a story), but most users will hardly ever expand stories and only click the main news article.

Google Promotes Google Accounts

Google created a new Web page that explains users why it's a good quality idea to create a Google account. "One name, one password. That's all you need. Its free. Take a look at how you can personalize and optimize your knowledge across all Google products and services."

Using a Google account, you can share photos, track your favorite stocks, get more storage for your email, share your schedule, create web pages and work together on documents, make free phone calls and chat face to face, get modified search results and personalized news, create custom maps and get the same experience on multiple devices. There's a lot you can do if you have a Google account.

While most of the new Google services and skin require an account, back in January 2005 Google didn't have many services that necessary authentication. As the Wayback Machine shows, the initial services obtainable with a Google account were Google Groups, Google Alerts, Google Answers and Google Web APIs, but Google promised that "in the future, your Google account will give access to all Google programs requiring sign in including: Google AdWords, Google Store and more." One year later, Google previously offered Froogle, Personalized Search and a Personalized Homepage and it was preparing to launch Google Calendar, Google Spreadsheets, Google Writely and to obtain YouTube.

Chromebooks

Fast, simple, secure, built for the Web, doesn't need administration. It's a Chromebook, a Chrome OS notebook that will be obtainable starting from next month.

"Chromebooks will be accessible online June 15 in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Netherlands, Italy and Spain. More countries will follow in the coming months. In the U.S., Chromebooks will be obtainable from Amazon and Best Buy and internationally from most important retailers," informs Google.

Google's simplified computing model puts the browser at the core and creates an operating system that revolves around Google Chrome. Samsung and Acer are the launch partners. Samsung's notebooks have 12.1" displays, Atom Dual-Core processors, 16 GB solid state drives, weigh 1.48 kg and get 8.5 hours of unremitting usage. They're similar to the Acer notebooks, which have 11.6" displays, a higher resolution, but only get 6 hours of usage. Some of the notebooks include 3G support, while other notebooks are Wi-Fi only. "The Samsung Chromebook will cost $429 in the U.S. for the Wi-Fi only account and $499 for the 3G version. Acer's Wi-Fi only Chromebook will cost $349," reports CNet.

Here's one of the Samsung Chromebooks:

While Chromebooks don't require management, businesses and schools need a way to manage hundreds or thousands of notebooks, so Google decided to offer a service that includes a cloud management console, support, device warranties and usual hardware refreshes for only $20/user (schools) or $28/user (businesses).

Chromebooks are actually the real netbooks, lightweight and low-priced computers built for simple tasks like browsing the Web. Unfortunately, netbooks are no longer very admired and users replace them with tablets like the iPad, which have better displays, better battery and are easier to use. For now, Chromebooks will contend with Windows netbooks and it won't be easy to induce people to buy a Chrome netbook when they could run Chrome on a regular netbook. The good news is that Chromebooks will force Google to get better its web applications, to offer more advanced features, more free storage and all Google users will advantage even if they don't buy a Chromebook.

Android: Past, Present and Future

Google I/O's first keynote was all about Android and there were many imposing announcements.

Android stats continue to be surprising: 100 million activated Android devices, 400,000 Android devices activated every day, 200,000 apps in the Android Market, 4.5 billion apps downloaded from the Android Market, 310 Android devices.

The next major Android release is called Ice Cream Sandwich and the goal is to create a united operating system that runs on phones, tablets and TVs. Ice Cream Sandwich will be released later this year, but there's a Honeycomb 3.1 update that adds support for USB accessories and for Google TV. This summer, people who bought Google TV devices will be able to put in Android 3.1 and run apps from the Android Market

Android users from the US can now rent movies from the Android Market. "You can decide to rent from thousands of movies starting at $1.99 and have them available across your Android devices — rent a movie on your home computer, and it'll be obtainable for viewing on your tablet or phone. You can rent from Android Market on the web today, and we'll be systematic out an update to Verizon XOOM customers beginning today. We'll start undulating out the update to Android 2.2 and above devices in the coming weeks," informs Google.

There's no music subscription service, but Google launched an invitation-only service that stores all your music on Google's servers and lets you stream it from roughly any computer and Android device.

iPhone/iPod/iPad users can install the latest software updates for at least two years, but that's not always the case when it comes to Android devices. Some Android phones run outmoded software at launch and not all of them are updated to the latest version because phone manufacturers and carriers don't think that's really important. Google and some of the other members of the Open Handset Alliance (Verizon, HTC, Samsung, Sprint, Sony Ericsson, LG, T-Mobile, Vodafone, Motorola and AT&T) started to expand some guidelines for updating firmware. "To start, we're equally announcing that new devices from participating partners will be given the latest Android platform upgrades for 18 months after the device is first released, as long as the hardware allows," informs Google.

Google also urbanized Android Open Accessory, "which allows external USB hardware (an Android USB accessory) to interrelate with an Android-powered device in a special accessory mode. (...) Many previously released Android-powered devices are only able of acting as a USB device and cannot initiate connections with external USB devices. Android Open Accessory support overcomes this limitation and allows you to build accessories that can interact with an collection of Android-powered devices by allowing the accessory commence the connection."

Probably the most interesting announcement is Android@Home, a framework that allows Android devices to converse with home appliances and other devices. It's an ambitious project that could make home automation part of everyday life. That's also one of the main reasons why Google bought Android: bringing Google's software to new devices, finding new ways to use Google's information in each day life, creating an ecosystem of smart devices with standard features and APIs that make "the world's information" more useful.

Google Calendar Adds Event Colors

Google Calendar still doesn't offer sustain for labels, but you can now pick a color for each event. By default, each event inherits the calendar's color, but you can change it by clicking the happening and using the small drop-down displayed next to the event's title.

"Color Coded Events lets you allocate specific colors to sure events: put pink on your daughter's soccer practice or make your lunch dates red. It's a great way to stay prepared, keep track of returning events, and add a little flair to your calendar. Color coding is private to you and anybody who can edit your calendar," explains Google.

If you want even more options, go to Google Calendar Labs and enable "Event flair" to be able to add icons to your events.

Google's Humans.txt File

Google has a robots.txt file that lists all paths that can't be crawled by Web spiders, but there's also a humans.txt file which tries to show that Google is not all concerning bots and algorithms

"Google is built by a large group of engineers, designers, researchers, robots, and others in many different sites across the globe. It is rationalized continuously, and built with more tools and technologies than we can shake a stick at. If you'd like to help us out, see google.com/jobs."

Google's Tim Bray connected to this text file and the Google Jobs Twitter account made it more popular.

YouTube's robots.txt file has lately added a humorous comment: "Created in the distant future (the year 2000) after the robotic rebellion of the mid 90's which wiped out all humans.

Google moms share tech tips for your family

As a Googler I frequently take my work home with me—in a good way. With two young boys at home, life is always busy, so my husband and I are always looking for ways to save time, get prepared and enrich our lives in simple ways. Because the products I beta test and use in the office have become an essential part of my own family life, for Mother’s Day this weekend I’d like to share some favorite tips, counting a few from other Googler parents.

Capturing and sharing memories

* Instead of observance 500 crayon masterpieces, store digital photos of all your kids’ artwork in Picasa Web Albums

* Collect trip or party photos in one place by letting all of your paparazzi upload their snapshots to a joint online album

* Tag friends and family in Picasa photos so you can easily create and share modified collages, gift CDs/DVDs or movie slideshows

* Use Picnik to edit your Picasa Web Albums photos. Use the “Create” tab to add text, stickers, frames and other effects to your photos—your kids can help, and you can email them as digital cards to far-away relatives

* Safely share home videos with family by attractive them to view a private YouTube video

* Keep a running family history by encouraging relatives around the world to add stories and biographies in a shared Google doc or blog

Communicating and entertaining

* Video chat through Gmail for free with long-distance grandparents and friends—this is also great for between kids with their parents when traveling

* Entertain kids on the run with kid-friendly YouTube channels—like Sesame Street and School House Rock—Android apps or your own photos and videos on your mobile phone (kids love watching themselves!)

* Have your kids help you create a video card or a cartoon on YouTube

* Explore the world from the couch—fly around Google Earth on your mobile phone or tablet

* On camping trips, use Sky Map to discover and name constellations. You can even travel back in time to show your kids what the sky looked like on the day they were born

* Read the classics—like Anne of Green Gables, The Wind in the Willows and Grimm’s Fairy Tales—for free from Google eBooks; for older kids, many books that are necessary reading for school are also free. Google eBooks are accessible and readable on devices your family probably already has—like laptops or smart phones

Organizing and planning

* Plan a group trip by creating a communal Google document or site with proposed dates and activities. Navigate around traffic and find the adjacent pit stop with Google Maps for mobile

* Using My Maps, get family and friends to help you collect ideas for activities in your area that are family-friendly

* Schedule family events, playdates and birthdays on a shared Google Calendar

* Track everything from infant feeding schedules, holiday gifts and thank-you notes to travel packing lists and family budgets with Google spreadsheets; look at the Template Gallery to modify yours

* Use forms in Google spreadsheets to send invitations to birthday parties and collect RSVPs (there are templates for these, too)

* Use the element filter in Recipe View to find recipes that exclude ingredients your kids won’t eat—like [meatballs without onions]—or use the time filter to find easy recipes your children can help prepare like chocolate chip cookies that take under 30 minutes

* Share a shopping list on Google Docs—whomever goes to the store can easily access it from the new Google Docs app on Android

I hope these tips motivate moms (and dads) to celebrate your family this weekend. Here’s hoping you can save time and energy to focus on having fun with your kids!

Google's New Snippets for News Sites

After altering the snippets for Twitter accounts, Google now displays the newest headlines in the snippets for news sites. Search for [washington post], [nytimes], [le monde], [gazzetta dello sport] and you'll find the newest news from the snippets.

Probably the best way to try the new attribute is to search for [news] and check the new snippets.

It's likely that the headlines are obtained from Google News, but not all the sites incorporated in Google News have the new snippets.

Google's New Link for Bypassing Country Redirects

Google has always displayed a link on the homepage that bypassed country redirects: "Google.com in English" or "Go to Google.com", depending on the language. The link sent users to google.com/ncr (ncr=no country redirect), the pure savor of Google that has all the new features and it's not partial towards the pages from a certain country.

Now the link to Google.com is also displayed under the search box so you can check the search results for the same inquiry at Google.com. It's an useful feature, but Google also changes a cookie value and users are no longer redirected to the country-specific domain. Maybe a clasp link similar to the link to iGoogle and the classic homepage would be more useful.

Google Chrome Tests numerous Profiles

As previously promised, Google in progress to test multiple profiles for Google Chrome. It's a Chrome OS feature that's now obtainable in Chrome's Canary builds and Chromium. Just enter about:flags in the address bar, enable "Multiple profiles" and click "Re launch browser" at the bottom of the page.

The new feature connections each window with a profile and lets you sync some of the settings with a Google account. Until now, you could create new profiles physically, but you had to use special shortcuts for each profile (Chrome has briefly added support for multiple profiles in the interface back in 2009, but it was quickly dropped). This feature is now available in the interface, even though it's more incomplete and you can only recognize profiles using Google accounts.

"The multiple profiles feature will allow the user to connect a profile with a specific set of browser windows, rather than with an entire running example of Chrome. Allowing different windows to run as different Chrome identities means that a user can have different open windows connected with different Google accounts, and correspondingly different sets of preferences, apps, bookmarks, and so on -- all those elements which are jump to a specific user's identity. Having multiple profiles in the Chrome browser also makes it easy to browse with divide identities without having to log in as separate users at the operating system level," explains a Google Chrome intend document.