How does this work?

Google have found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate current flu activity around the world in near real-time.

Each week, millions of users around the world search for health information online. As you might expect, there are more flu-related searches during flu season, more allergy-related searches during allergy season, and more sunburn-related searches during the summer. You can explore all of these phenomena using Google Insights for Search. But can search query trends provide the basis for an accurate, reliable model of real-world phenomena?

Google have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for “flu” is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries are added together. Google compared our query counts with traditional flu surveillance systems and found that many search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often Google see these search queries, Google can estimate how much flu is circulating in different countries and regions around the world. Our results have been published in the journal Nature.

Try it here :Google flu trends

Back in 2001, Google had made things a lot easier for the internet community to search for images via the Image Search option. According to the latest reports from the Official Google Blog, that service has been developing and one of the newer updates was called Similar Images which enabled users to find a larger variety of pictures according to what they were looking for. But the Google Labs have been buzzing some more and a new experimental feature that they’re testing, called Google Image Swirl, allows for research to cluster similar images into representative groups in a fun, exploratory interface.

The new search option allows you to further explore additional sub-groups within any cluster. It’s a wheel like design that’s easy on the eyes and simple to use. Image Swirl expands on technologies developed for Similar Images and Picasa Face Recognition to discern how images should be grouped together and build hierarchies out of these groups. Each thumbnail on the initial results page represents an algorithmically-determined representative group of images with similar appearance and meaning. These aren’t just the most relevant images — they are the most relevant groups of image

Google Labs a lansat Image Swirl, cea mai nouă aplicaţie pentru imagini, care reprezintă o nouă abordare a serviciului Google Images, ce rulează de opt ani.

Ce face mai precis Google Image Swirl ? Dacă este tastat, spre exemplu, cuvântul “flower”, textul are tendinţa de a se autocompleta. Apoi după ce este apăsat butonul de căutare apare un set de 12 fotografii. Fiecare dintre aceste seturi reprezintă o altă legătură către imaginile cu flori. Grupându-le în acest fel, Google Image Swirl speră să aducă în faţa utilizatorului cât mai multe rezultate relevante grupate laolaltă.

Serviciul Google Image Swirl este un proiect al Google Labs, şi, fiind deocamdată experimental, nu se ştie când sau dacă va fi introdus oficial. Unele dintre proiectele Google Labs s-au stins în timp, în timp ce altele se găsesc şi acum în suita Google.

Google is testing a new social search function to make it easier for people find their friends’ blogs and twitter feeds.

 The only catch is that users of the service need to have an open profile with Google that includes personal contact data.

 Once those conditions are met, the user can access the service at the Google Labs. Typing in “New York” will yield a list of friends in the user’s social network who have posted items from the Big Apple. Settings can be altered so that only postings from close friends and acquaintances are included in the “social graph.”

 Google Germany spokesman Stefan Keuchel says the new social search function is separate from a recently launched service allowing real time searches of Twitter feeds. Social Search works quickly, but not in real time. It is currently only available in English.

Back in August, we were shocked to learn thatGoogle was working on a new version of its search engine. The secret project, known officially as Google Caffeine, wouldn’t change the face or design of the Google search engine, but would instead provide an overhaul of the architecture of Google’s web search that would improve its indexing speed, accuracy, and comprehensiveness. Since the launch of the developer preview however, we haven’t heard much about it. It’s quietly been undergoing testing and tweaking. That’s all changing though, as now the developer preview of Google Caffeine has been taken down, replaced with anannouncement that Google Caffeine will go live in its first datacenter soon. At Web 2.0 Summit, Marissa Mayer announced that “Google Social Search” will be launching in coming weeks: “There’s a new Google product called Social Search that is launching in Google Labs. This is a new feature that allows you to see results for queries from people in your social network. This works by using your Google Profile. If you fill it out with the other social networks you’re a member of, such as FriendFeed, Google will scan who you are connected to and give your results from those people.” “Mayer demonstrated how a search for “New Zealand” produced a list of search results that included relevant content created by friends midway-down the search results page. Among the search results were links to a Gmail message that referenced New Zealand and a FriendFeed entry, each from a different friend,”

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SMS Channels from Google Labs India allows mobile users to form communities and exchange messages to each other.

The concept is similar to a mailing list. A user can go to Google Labs site and find the various channels of interest to him. Different channels are available under categories like Business, BuyandSell, education, entertainment, health, jobs and so on. If one has google account, he/she can join a channel of their interest by giving the mobile number and subscribe to the channels. If there are messages posted to that channel, they will come as a message to the subscriber.

A subscriber can also join the SMS channels without going to the Google Channels site by sending ON <name of the channel> to 9870807070. One can manage the subscriptions of different channels from mobile.

The service is free and allows upto 10 free messages from the channel owner per day. Subscriber can send a message to the channel by typing SEND <name of channel> <message> from the mobile or go to the website and post a message.

Setting up and tearing down a channel is quite fast for the channel owners. Channel owner can send invites to mobile numbers of friends.

Google lists all channels sorted by active users wise and provides a search box (what else do you expect in a Google site?)

I explored the service and here is my experience:

• It is very easy to create channel and set up invites to your friends
• The latency time of message delivery is not predictable. Sometimes, it took hours to get the message. Sometimes, it comes pretty fast.
• Works fine with indian languages.
• One can search for channels and find the ones that interest you

The great advantages of the service are :

• It is free
• Supports unlimited users and many Indian languages
• Subscriber does not need an internet account to use the service.

Though the service is impressive and free, there are some wrinkles. Many channels seem to be inactive – it looks like they were setup for experimenting and then left to rot. There are multiple channels for same service and many are stale. For example, I found 4 channels for Bangalore weather and all of them are inactive, though all of them claim to give daily update of Bangalore weather. Google can avoid showing inactive channels. This will help remove the clutter.

On the whole, Google SMS channels is a powerful, free service from Google India. Keep looking for interesting uses of the service!

Searching made easier we all used to search listed mp3 in google or in amazon or any other sites rather than going to each and every site and searching for an mp3 we can search by just giving the keyword.more efficient then google.where in google the same keyword can contain many site this is a dedicated only for mp3.Enjaoy Musiq

Download Link:
Search Web

Okay, sorry for the Rocky Horror Picture Show reference, but the song lyric comes to mind when I think of Google labs. Those folks always have something cooking. According to the site, “Google Labs is a playground where our more adventurous users can play around with prototypes of some of our wild and crazy ideas and offer feedback directly to the engineers who developed them. Please note that Labs is the first phase in a lengthy product development process and none of this stuff is guaranteed to make it onto Google.com. While some of our crazy ideas might grow into the next Gmail or iGoogle, others might turn out to be, well, just plain crazy.” I love this stuff.

One of my favorites is Fast Flip.  You can get overviews of headline pages from top newspapers all in one place. You can also search by section like Travel or Sci/Tech. Something else that seems to be gaining attention from students is Google Squared. “Google Squared is an experimental tool that takes a category (like US presidents, roller coasters, or digital cameras) and attempts to create a starter “square” of information, automatically fetching and organizing facts from across the web.” After you get your results, you can tweak the search by adding or deleting rows and columns.

If you have a Gmail account, there is a lab section for that, too. It has handy email based features that can be enabled like “Forgotten Attachment Detector” or “Message Translation.“

Come up to the lab and experiment a little. You never know what you might find.

Technology ~ it takes you there

~ Janet ~

Google Social Search

O que é?

É um novo recurso que permite buscar por termos ou palavras em conteúdo de redes sociais do próprio usuário que está efetuando a busca, na prática o usuário ao efetuar uma busca por um filme por exemplo, nos resultados ele encontra uma nota ou review deste filme em um blog ou um tweet de seus contatos e ou pessoas ligadas a seus contatos.

Como posso utilizá-lo?

Até o momento ele está disponível apenas no google.com e através do google labs, posteriormente ele será agregado as funções padrão do google.

Qual a principal fonte de informações?

Ele utiliza as informações de seu perfil no google, desta forma ele pode indexar informações vindas de seu blog, de seus contatos, de feeds em seu google reader entre outros serviços que você ativou em seu perfil.

Qual a diferença em relação a busca social no Bing?

A Microsoft fez um acordo com o Twitter para que o Bing pudesse indexar conteúdo dos tweets dos usuários do Twitter de acordo com a palavra ou termo usado para a busca. O uso deste recurso no Bing deve ser acessado pelo endereço http://www.bing.com/twitter e funciona apenas se configurar as opções do Bing para localidade EUA. Diferente do Google Search Social, o Bing não faz qualquer correlação de seus resultados utilizando o Live id, portanto logando ou não com seu Live id, para o Bing isso não faz a menor diferença.
Desta forma fica claro que apesar de todo o alvoroço da Microsoft em torno de seu novo serviço, quem realmente “quebrou a banca” foi o Google e seu novo recurso.

Scoops Here.

Google’s development team has done it again, and this time it is personal. No really, it is. Just a few short days ago Google Labs released Social Search.

Social Search taps into a user’s social network profiles and displays relevant links and status updates that members of a user’s own social network have shared at the bottom of the default search results page. Now social medialites will have a customized and tailored search experience. So as you search for your local fast food chain you can see what you can see what offers are going on through their Twitter feed.

To get started, you first have to head over to Google Labs’s experimental section and activate this feature. For now, Social Search will only be available in the US and in English. You will also need at least one of the three Google sources to access Social Search: Gmail Contacts, Google Reader Subscriptions and Your Google Profile.

Although you don’t need to have a Google Profile at the moment this service is a hub for social networking profiles on Social Search. Based on the information in your Google Profile, Google can auto-detect your social networking profiles and your friends on services like Flickr, FriendFeed, YouTube, Reddit, Digg, del.icio.us, BrightKite, and many others.

I know the pitchforks are being raised already for those who see the potential privacy issues…but at this moment I am not caring.

Google has made a big announcement today in the Google blog that Similar Images will now be a permanent feature in Google Images. They have graduated from Google Labs to be another full-fledged member of the Google repertoire.

Google Images Refined

What does this mean for us as image searchers? I decided to search Google Images for “dogs”. Think that is a big category? You bet. There are over 57 million images! The results produce images of different dogs, advertising images, and even an image of a hot dog. Wanting to narrow things down a little I pick my favorite image, two labs in a field, and click beneath it where it says “Find Similar Images”.  Now my search is a bit refined showing labs and other sporting dogs in outdoor scenes. No more hot dogs, or advertising images. My results have also been narrowed down to 620 images.

Google is rolling this out gradually and searches will be able to be refined even further to narrow results to just exactly what you are looking for. Some of you may be able to do this now but I don’t think it is working for everyone at this time. Google is continually striving to make our searches easier and faster to find the exact information we need. Three cheers for Google,their search engine, and their extraordinary technicians!

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