healthy4u

I'm feeling lazy...

Posted by Kai Shih, Software Engineer A few nice updates to the <a href="http://www.google.com/ig?source=gbpa">Personalized Homepage</a> this week for those who are feeling too lazy to customize it. If for instance you're feeling lazy about browsing for new content to add to your homepage, there's a new feature that will give you item-to-item recommendations. For my part, I have the <a href="http://www.google.com/ig/directory?root=%2Fig&dpos=top&amp;amp;amp;num=24&url=http://digg.com/goog/ig.xml&q=Digg&start=0&source=gbpa">Digg gadget</a> on my page. If I click on the gadget's drop-down menu and select "You might also like..." I'll get a <a href="http://www.google.com/ig/directory?root=%2Fig&dpos=top&amp;amp;amp;num=24&recommend=http://digg.com/goog/ig.xml&source=gbpa">bunch of stuff</a> that other people who like Digg also liked, including Slashdot, Wired News, Macworld, and more. For those who are too lazy to create new tabs to organize stuff, here's a bit of magic. If you add a new tab to your homepage, you can name your tab and have the option of letting us select the content for you based on your chosen name. Say I create a tab called "Astronomy" to get the latest news and info on that topic. We'll populate the page with the NASA image of the day, the current moon phase, and a bunch of feeds related to astronomy. Less lazy folks are welcome to try to stump us with tab names. And if you just don't know what you want, we've added ratings and reviews to our <a href="http://www.google.com/ig/directory">directory</a>, so you can see what other people have to say before committing to a new gadget. <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Web_Search_Help-Personalizing/topics">Let us know</a> what you think. We're never too lazy to listen.

I'm feeling lazy...

Posted by Kai Shih, Software Engineer A few nice updates to the Personalized Homepage this week for those who are feeling too lazy to custo...

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Suggest a better translation

Posted by Jeff Chin, International Product Manager We think automatic translation is really cool, and we're excited to provide useful translations so you can surf web pages in unfamiliar languages. Still, translation is a very hard problem, and we know that when you use <a title="http://translate.google.com/" href="http://translate.google.com/">translate.google.com</a> to read web pages in other languages, you sometimes encounter translations that we get wrong. We have a system that can learn to translate better if we know where the problems are. In the past, there was no way to tell us about problem translations. Now there is. Next time you see a sentence that makes you go "hmmm," just hover over it to display the original text tooltip and click the "Suggest a better translation" link. Tell us what it should have said, and we'll use your suggestion to improve translation quality in future updates to our service. This feature is available when you use one of the language translation pairs developed by our research group: <ul><li>English to/from Arabic</li><li>English to/from Chinese (Simplified/Traditional)</li><li>English to/from Russian</li><li>Chinese (Simplified) to/from Chinese (Traditional)</li></ul>So the next time you can think of a better translation, be sure to use this new interface and share your wisdom! That way, everyone will benefit from it.

Suggest a better translation

Posted by Jeff Chin, International Product Manager We think automatic translation is really cool, and we're excited to provide useful ...

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Feeling sick? Go home!

Posted by Taraneh Razavi, M.D. From time to time, our resident physician at Google headquarters weighs in with her thoughts on healthy living. (You can find more on <a href="http://dr-razavi.blogspot.com/">her personal blog</a>.) Please note that she is not dispensing medical advice; you should check with your own doctor before pursuing any particular course of action. Attention workaholics: I would like to remind you that your medical needs should take precedence over your work duties. We are in the midst of the flu season and I see people with fevers of 102 degrees dragging themselves in to work. Recently I've found myself practically escorting sick employees out to make sure that they go home as advised. This phenomenon of presentee-ism is not unique to Google, of course. But wherever you work, while your dedication to your work is admirable and appreciated, when you're sick it is harmful to you, to your colleagues, and to <a href="http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/news/20040423/Presenteeism-Employees-Employers">your company's bottom line</a>. So please take care of yourselves. Work from home if you must, but don't come in -- or I will have to hire some bouncers to keep you out!

Feeling sick? Go home!

Posted by Taraneh Razavi, M.D. From time to time, our resident physician at Google headquarters weighs in with her thoughts on healthy livin...

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Stuck in traffic?

Posted by David Wang, Software Engineer There's nothing worse than getting stuck in traffic when you have some place to go, so I'm happy to tell you about a new feature on <a href="http://maps.google.com/">Google Maps</a> that can help. For more than 30 major U.S. cities, you can now see up-to-date traffic conditions to help you plan your schedule and route. If you're in <a href="http://maps.google.com/?z=10&ll=37.779399,-122.419281&layer=t">San Francisco</a>, <a href="http://maps.google.com/?layer=t&z=10&ll=40.714997,-74.006653">New York</a> , <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?layer=t&z=10&ll=41.883876,-87.632446">Chicago</a>, <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?layer=t&z=10&ll=32.778038,-96.795044">Dallas</a>, or any of the other cities we now include, just click on the traffic button to show current traffic speeds directly on the map. If your route shows red, you're looking at a stop-and-go commute; yellow, you could be a little late for dinner; green, you've got smooth sailing. We can't make traffic go away, but we hope Google Maps traffic info helps you avoid it whenever possible.

Stuck in traffic?

Posted by David Wang, Software Engineer There's nothing worse than getting stuck in traffic when you have some place to go, so I'm h...

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Wish I had Google Scholar as a grad student

Posted by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist From time to time, our own <a href="http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/raman/">T.V. Raman</a> shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see—tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful. - Ed. Conducting research from the comfort of one's office or home is a wonderful convenience, but it's especially rewarding when you need to go the extra mile in accessing research publications. When I was a graduate student at Cornell, I needed to go to the library with a reader (yes, an actual live human, not a computer:-)), find the relevant publications, and then arrange to have what I judged to be the most relevant articles read to me. Occasionally, I would scan the printed articles to OCR them and have my computer read it aloud to me. Mostly this was a failure since the articles I wanted to read were in the fields of math or computer science, and OCR dealt poorly, if at all, with technical material. More often than not, I would write to the authors of the publications in the hope of getting access to online versions so that I could save on reader time. Turning the clock forward to today, equivalent access is a <a href="http://scholar.google.com/">Google Scholar search</a> away. What's more, thanks to publishers like the ACM who making journal publications available online, one can access the complete publication directly from within the search hits. Since the advent of Google Scholar, I have not had to send out email requests to authors asking for access to the electronic versions. And where authors have made these available from their websites, Google Scholar links to those as part of the result set. So I wish I had had this as a graduate student. Though I have to say working at Google does feel like being in graduate school (but with better food and more money)—so maybe my wish has been granted.

Wish I had Google Scholar as a grad student

Posted by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as...

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The Robots Exclusion Protocol

Posted by Dan Crow, Product Manager This is the second in a short series of posts about the Robots Exclusion Protocol, the standard for controlling how web pages on your site are indexed. This post provides more details and examples of mechanisms to control access and indexing of your website by Google. In the <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/01/controlling-how-search-engines-access.html">first post</a> in this series, I introduced robots.txt and robots META tags, giving an overview of when to use them. In this post, I'll look at some examples of the power of the protocol. These examples illustrate the detailed and fine-grain control online publishers have over how their websites are indexed. <h3> Preventing Googlebot from following a link </h3> Usually when the Googlebot finds a page, it reads all the links on that page and then fetches those pages and indexes them. This is the basic process by which Googlebot "crawls" the web. This is useful as it allows Google to include all the pages on your site, as long as they are linked together. Let's say you run the TheHighsteadPost.com website. Here's a map of part of the site: <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjC5VlUtr2xKs7blO1bn74QT6CCU5kd3BCGflIEZe9PWXu7sXUfwWZDH22x1i16gQLwdapPvFf7LdT6k_VdEXizSgd8LWghNTr_nNP9IFBIzZlD3I0bJA78ExB6YdF34KzrjXrITHI1UnA/s1600-h/TheHighsteadPost.png"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5034461632325253906" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjC5VlUtr2xKs7blO1bn74QT6CCU5kd3BCGflIEZe9PWXu7sXUfwWZDH22x1i16gQLwdapPvFf7LdT6k_VdEXizSgd8LWghNTr_nNP9IFBIzZlD3I0bJA78ExB6YdF34KzrjXrITHI1UnA/s400/TheHighsteadPost.png" style="cursor: pointer;" /></a> When Googlebot crawls the index.html file, it finds the links to breakingnews.html and articles.html. From breakingnews.html, it can find valentinesday.html and promnight.html and so on. What if you didn't want valentinesday.html and promnight.html appearing in Google's index? The articles in the Breaking News section may only appear for a few hours before being updated and moved to the Articles section. In this case you want the full articles indexed, not the breaking news version. You could put the NOINDEX tag on both those pages. But if the set of pages in the Breaking News section changed frequently, it would be a lot of work to continually update the pages with the NOINDEX tag and then remove it again when they moved into the articles section. Instead, you can add the NOFOLLOW tag to the breakingnews.html page. This tells the Googlebot not to follow any links it finds on that page, thus hiding valentinesday.html and promnight.html and any other pages linked from there. Simply add this line to the <HEAD> section of breakingnews.html: <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOFOLLOW"> However, there is an important caveat to NOFOLLOW that you should know about. It only stops Google from following links from one page to another. If one of the linked pages is also linked from somewhere else, Google can still find and index that page via that other link. For example if promnight.html is also linked from HighsteadCourier.com, Google can still find and index promnight.html when it indexes HighsteadCourier.com and follows the link from there to promnight.html. Using NOFOLLOW is generally not the best method to ensure content does not appear in our search results. Using the NOINDEX tag on individual pages or controlling access using robots.txt is the best way to achieve this. <h3> Controlling Caching and Snippets</h3> The Robots Exclusion Protocol allows you to specify, to some extent, how you would like your web pages should appear in Google's search results. Usually search results show a cached page link and a snippet, two features that our users tell us are very useful. Here, for example, is the first result I got when I searched for "Mallard duck": <h3><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheQJMwn_UsLsfo5hRRlljrMTBU3_7qQ0j7r8nkLZ5mRD4RO8wxi7QG4GB7X6AK7TAnLSd31RhWN0R7PGtMwfDGi9N2BXeVRjsjUHqCOGWwrlhzTquaTKEuK6X-W87NRIpvbYqniABHOhU/s1600-h/Picture+2.png"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5034464415464061730" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheQJMwn_UsLsfo5hRRlljrMTBU3_7qQ0j7r8nkLZ5mRD4RO8wxi7QG4GB7X6AK7TAnLSd31RhWN0R7PGtMwfDGi9N2BXeVRjsjUHqCOGWwrlhzTquaTKEuK6X-W87NRIpvbYqniABHOhU/s400/Picture+2.png" style="cursor: pointer;" /></a></h3> The snippet is the extract of text from the web page, in this case it starts "The mallard duck is found mostly in North America...". We know from user studies that users are more likely to visit your site if the search results show the snippet. Why? Because snippets make it much easier for users to see why the result is relevant to their query. If a user isn't able to make this determination quickly, he or she usually moves on to the next search result. Underneath the snippet is the URL of the page followed by the "cached" link. Clicking on this link takes you to a copy of the page stored on Google's servers. This is useful in a number of cases: for sites that are temporarily unavailable; for news sites that get overloaded in the aftermath of a major event, for example, 9/11; for sites that are accidentally deleted. Another advantage is that Google's cached copy highlights the words a person searched for, allowing them to quickly see how the page is relevant to their query. Usually you want Google to display both the snippet and the cached link. However, there are some cases where you might want to disable one or both of these. For example, say you were a newspaper publisher, and you have a page whose content changes several times a day. It may take longer than a day for us to reindex a page, so users may have access to a cached copy of the page that is not the same as the one currently on your site. In this case, you probably don't want the cached link appearing in our results. Again, the Robots Exclusion Protocol comes to your aid. Add the NOARCHIVE tag to a web page and Google won't cache copy of a web page in search results: <META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE"> Similarly, you can tell Google not to display a snippet for a page. The NOSNIPPET tag achieves this: <META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOSNIPPET"> Adding NOSNIPPET also has the effect of preventing a cache link from being shown, so if you specify NOSNIPPET you automatically get NOARCHIVE too. <h3> Learn more </h3> As usual the Google Webmaster Help pages have a lot of useful information: <ul> <li> <a href="http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40364" title="More on Googlebot and robots.txt">More on Googlebot and robots.txt</a> </li> <li> <a href="http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35248&topic=8846" title="Our robots.txt analysis tool">Our robots.txt analysis tool</a> </li> </ul> <h3> </h3><h3> Next time... </h3> The final post in this series will take some common exclusion problems that webmasters have told us about and show how to solve them using the Robots Exclusion Protocol.

The Robots Exclusion Protocol

Posted by Dan Crow, Product Manager This is the second in a short series of posts about the Robots Exclusion Protocol , the standard for con...

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You never know what you'll need to know

Posted by Anita Yuen, Senior Product Marketing Manager When people share their stories about how Google search has made a difference in their lives, we know we're doing our job. It's also given us an opportunity to learn about the breadth of information that you can find on Google. Such as how to find a lost tortoise -- as Jim Lyness did. Here's his story: <div><div style="direction: ltr;"><blockquote> "After Christmas, my son Sam wanted a turtle. We bought a Russian Tortoise instead and named him Rocky. Well, one day, we let Rocky out for a stroll around the house. We could not find him that night and into the afternoon the following day. After the boys went to school, my wife, Susan, and I were stumped. Did Rocky get out the front door? My wife told me I was crazy. Susan googled [how to find a Russian Tortoise] and bang -- we had a game plan. Russian Tortoises like warm, dark spaces. We started in the boys' bedroom, again. We pulled the bunk bed back and there was Rocky at the head of the bed. Case solved. When we tell friends and family about googling How to Find a Russian Tortoise, they bust a gut in laughter! </blockquote> </div> </div> If you have a story about how Google search has made an impact on you, we'd love to hear it. <a href="http://www.google.com/contact/success.html">Tell us here</a> or <a href="http://www.youtube.com/my_videos_upload">post a video</a> (be sure to tag it "google testimonial"). You never know when you'll need to search for a lost pet. p.s. While our <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/10/do-you-google.html">lawyers may not be happy</a> with Jim's use of 'googled' and 'googling', we are very pleased that Jim and Susan were able to find what they needed by searching on Google.

You never know what you'll need to know

Posted by Anita Yuen, Senior Product Marketing Manager When people share their stories about how Google search has made a difference in thei...

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