Software utilities

Google researchers announced at the International World Wide Web Conference held in Beijing the development of an algorithm to rank images, called Visualrank (pdf available). Google engineers claim this new image search results in much more relevant image results. This algorithm get the first images returned by a standard query and then analyzes them, finding the more similar ones, using a similar approach to the one used for Pagerank (the algorithm for ordering web page results). The paper shows image search results for some sets of images, such as Mona Lisa (on the left), grouped and linked (the two big ones on the center are the more relevant ones).

The old image ranking algorithm was based on text associated to images on the page, leading sometimes to inaccurate, or also completely wrong, results.

The algorithm has been developed by focusing on the top 2000 searched products on Google, such as iPod, XBox or Zune (the Microsoft MP3 reader).

This has not yet been developed, but you can have a look at the Google image search to see for example the face recognition feature, try it and check if it is enabled on your website.

On a recent Gmail official blog post, two interesting hidden features were exposed. The first one is that when you have a Gmail address, let’s say myaddress@gmail.com, you can add a plus sign at the end of the user name (technically, the local part) to get additional addresses (in this way, you get unlimited addresses!). This can be useful in many situations. The first one can be to filter particular messages, let’s say, you use myaddress+bank@… for your bank account, and star or filter it. Since this can be exploited by spammers, I suggest you to use more sophisticated names, not a simple +bank, to certify the authenticity of an e-mail. You could also use this feature to track your e-mail, for example, you give it to someone with a +id123 and when you receive an e-mail to that address you know that that person gave it away without your permission.

Another hidden Gmail feature is that it does not recognizes dots in the username, so my.address and myaddress are the same for Google. Dunno how one could use this, any ides?

Web marketing relies on good content and articles, both on your own websites and for article marketing, that is, placing articles with links to your websites in article directory and other websites. The problem for most SEO is how to create these unique articles, to place them in other websites. So I started thinking and created a small tool, that can create an unlimited number of articles from one! How does it work? Well, try it out here! Try creating your own unique articles now, using a nice word-like interface, and let me know what you think about it!

Is Maka Maka the Google’s answer to Facebook?

Trying to contrast the enormous success of the new social bookmarking service, Google is launching a new social, which is called MakaMaka, which is good deal in Hebrew and friend in Fiji. Google is used to buy competitive software houses, but Microsoft beat it, since it acquired a small share of Facebook (around 10%) for 240 millions dollars.

This new project, code name Maka-Maka, will enable users to share data between all Google services (including Gmail, Google Reader, Orkut and so on) and also with other sites and social platforms. This will be done through a set of API, which should transform “every Google application in a social network, without letting people notice they participate in another social network”.

Will this be a killer application? Will it have success? It’s maybe too early to know, we’ll see soon who will win this new Intenret war.

EDIT: Original presentation should be Nov. the 5th, but it’s going to be later, maybe 8th or 9th, and will probably be limited to the Google social network, Orkut.