Google Tests a Navigation Bar Integrated with Google Profiles

Google has been testing different versions of a new steering bar that removes link underlining and adds a menu for the features that now mess the bar.

The latest iteration of Google's experiment replaces your email address with your name and shows the photo from your Google Profile. Right now, creating a Google Profile is elective, but I wouldn't be astonished to see that this will change. If there's one thing that unifies almost all Google services, that's the navigation bar and it makes sense to add social features to the persistent bar.

Introducing the Google Translate app for iPhone

Back in August 2008, we launched a Google interpret HTML5 web app for iPhone users. Today, the official Google Translate for iPhone app is obtainable for download from the App Store. The new app has all of the features of the web app, plus some significant new trappings designed to improve your overall translation experience.

Speak to translate

The new app accepts voice input for 15 languages, and—just like the web app—you can convert a word or phrase into one of more than 50 languages. For voice input, just press the microphone icon next to the text box and say what you want to transform.

Listen to your translations

You can also listen to your translations vocal out loud in one of 23 different languages. This feature uses the same new speech synthesizer voices as the desktop account of Google Translate we introduced last month.

Full-screen mode

Another feature that strength come in handy is the ability to easily increase the translated text to full-screen size. This way, it’s much easier to read the text on the screen, or show the translation to the person you are communicating with. Just tap on the zoom icon to rapidly zoom in.

And the app also includes all of the major features of the web app, counting the ability to view dictionary results for single words, access your starred translations and translation history even when offline, and support romanized wording like Pinyin and Romaji.

You can download Google Translate now as of the App Store globally. The app is obtainable in all iOS supported languages, but you’ll need an iPhone or iPod touch iOS version 3 or later.

IPv6 marks the next chapter in the history of the Internet

In the same way your phone is linked with a single number, your computer is assigned a exclusive Internet Protocol (IP) address when you connect to the Internet. The current protocol, IPv4, allows for about 4 billion unique addresses—and that number is about to run out.

This morning the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced (PDF) that it has spread the last batch of its remaining IPv4 addresses to the world’s five Regional Internet Registries, the organizations that manage IP addresses in dissimilar regions. These Registries will begin conveying the final IPv4 addresses within their regions until they run out completely, which could come as soon as early 2012.

As the last blocks of IPv4 addresses are assigned, acceptance of a new protocol—IPv6—is essential to the sustained growth of the open Internet. IPv6 will expand Internet address space to 128 bits, making room for approximately 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses (enough to preceding us for the foreseeable future).

Google, along with others, has been functioning for years to implement the larger IPv6 format. We’re also participating in the intended World IPv6 Day, scheduled for June 8, 2011. On this day, all of the participating organizations will allow access to as many services as possible via IPv6.

Today’s ICANN statement marks a major milestone in the history of the Internet. IPv6, the next chapter, is at the present under way.

This week in search 2/4/2011

This week it got just a bit faster to discover the right things to buy and the right places to go, with a little help from Google—and your friends. Simply type a few characters and get Google Instant outcome in the “Shopping” view, and find recommendations from your friends with Hotpot in search results.

Instant results in the “Shopping” view

Now you can shop faster than ever and get the speed of Google Instant when comparing prices, looking for nearby stores and knowledge about products you want to buy. For example, if you’re searching for a cast iron skillet, we’ll start showing you applicable pans as you type [cast iro...]. Click “Shopping” in the left-hand panel and try penetrating for [sweater wrap shawl], [android phone] or anything else.

Hotpot recommendations in search results

Earlier this week we additional Hotpot recommendations to regular search results on Google. So now, if you’re looking for restaurants in San Francisco, you can simply look for Google for [restaurants sf]. If a friend has rated a particular place, you might see her estimation right under the listing. We also prolonged Hotpot to 38 new languages so people can share their favorite places around the world.

Whether you’re cooking at home or dining out, we hope this week’s updates help you find what you’re looking for just a little bit faster

9 Things to Try in Google Chrome 9

Google Chrome 9 is now available, two months after the previous release and two weeks later than Google's self-imposed deadline. Here are 9 features you should try in this new version:

1. WebGL is now enabled by default in Google Chrome and you can try the 3D web apps from Google's gallery. Don't miss Body Browser, a Google Earth for the human body, and the WebGL Aquarium.

2. Google Instant is now integrated with Chrome's address bar, but this feature is not for everyone because it automatically loads web pages as you type. It's disabled by default, so you need to enable it by checking "Enable Instant for faster searching and browsing" in the Options dialog.

3. Cloud Print can be enabled from Options > Under the hood. This features lets you print from devices that can't communicate directly with printers. The first two applications that use Cloud Print are the mobile versions of Gmail and Google Docs.

4. Chrome supports WebP files. WebP is a new image format created by Google whose main advantage is that it offers better compression. "Our team focused on improving compression of the lossy images, which constitute the larger percentage of images on the web today. To improve on the compression that JPEG provides, we used an image compressor based on the VP8 codec that Google open-sourced in May 2010." Here's an example of WebP image.

5. Right-click on an extension button next to the address bar and select "Hide button". When you change your mind, go to Tools > Extensions and click on "Show button" next to the corresponding extension.

6. Create desktop shortcuts for your web apps: right-click on an app in the new tab page and select "create shortcut". You can also add shortcuts to the Start Menu and the Quick Launch Bar if you use Windows.

7. Launch web apps in a new window. Right-click on a web app and select "open as window".

8. Install extensions that add custom menu options to images. For example, install Clip It Good to upload any image from a web page to Picasa Web Albums.

9. Install extensions that use the Omnibox API to associate keywords with new search engines. For example, install the DOI Resolver extension and type doi 10.1205/096030802760309188 in the address bar. The extension added a new search engine and associated it with the keyword doi.

Android Market for the Web

 Google has finally released the Web-based description of the Android Market, which is now available at market.android.com. You can link to applications, find apps from your computer and install them over the air.

Android Market for the Web includes all the applications, not just the ones that are obtainable for a certain device or a certain description of Android, so it's much more complete than the application that's installed on your Android device. You'll be able to find paid apps even if you live in a country where you can only put in free apps and you'll be able to find apps that require Froyo even if your phone still uses Android Donut. In fact, you don't even have to be an Android user to discover the Market.

I've tried to install an application from the web site, but Google shows an "invalid request" error after the verification process.

To make the Market even better, Google announced two additional features that will be available soon: in-app purchases and fixed pricing for various currencies. That means you'll see less apps that cost $1.73 or €2.26, pretentious that developers will adjust their prices.

Google Results, One of Bing's Ranking Signals

Danny Sullivan has a story about Google's claims that Bing copies Google search results. Google noticed that there's an rising overlap between the top results at Google and Bing, so it supposed that Microsoft was using Google's results to improve its search engine.

To verify its doubts, Google set up a smart operation. For the first time in its history, Google crafted one-time code that would allow it to physically rank a page for a certain term (code that will soon be removed, as described further below). It then created about 100 of what it calls "synthetic" searches, queries that few people, if anyone, would ever enter into Google.

These searches returned no matches on Google or Bing — or a tiny number of poor superiority matches, in a few cases — before the experiment went live. With the code enabled, Google placed a honeypot page to show up at the top of each synthetic search.

The only reason these pages appeared on Google was because Google required them to be there. There was nothing that made them obviously relevant for these searches. If they started to appeared at Bing after Google, that would mean that Bing took Google's bait and derivative its results.

This all happened in December. When the experiment was ready, about 20 Google engineers were told to run the test queries from laptops at home, using Internet Explorer, with optional Sites and the Bing Toolbar both enabled. They were also told to click on the top results. They started on December 17. By December 31, some of the results started appearing on Bing. (...) Only a small number of the test searches produced this result, about 7 to 9 (depending on when exactly Google checked) out of the 100.

Microsoft's engineers almost certainly thought that Google's results were pretty good, so why not use clickstream data from Internet Explorer and Bing Toolbar to monitor the results picked by Google users? It's a clever idea, but not when you're using it to unnaturally add results from Google. Bing's team says that they use "collective intelligence" to improve search results, so we can assume that a non-negligible amount of intelligence comes from Google. When you're including results just because Google does it, you're credulous Google too much and you implicitly admit that Google offers better results.