Google Elections Video Search Gadget

It uses " speech recognition software to automatically produce rough transcripts of presidential campaign videos." You can get it here.

Using the gadget you can search not only the titles and descriptions of the videos, but also their spoken content. Additionally, since speech recognition tells us exactly when words are spoken in the video, you can jump right to the most relevant parts of the videos you find.

SearchEngineWatch.com says it "leaves a lot to be desired" because it only transcribes "fragmented snippets" of political speech. I searched for Kentucky and this is how it transcribed Hillary Clinton's speech the night Barack Obama clinched the nomination:

"sex is the media west Virginia and Kentucky why don't we go and."

I'd say that about sums up the campaign so far.

Google Maps adds Louisville Street View

Louisville is the latest city to get Google Maps Street View. If you're not familiar with it, Street View gives you a ground-level look at selected cities. You can take a virtual drive down any street, rotating the view 360 degrees to see building fronts and pedestrians. Louisville and Lexington are among 37 new areas added this week. Google is blurring faces now after spotting strange or embarrassing moments captured by Google's roving cameras became a Web sport. Other features added to Google Maps recently include photographs from Panoramio and entries from Wikipedia. To try these just click on the "Street View" or "More" buttons on the upper right corner of the map.

This YouTube video gives you a better idea of what Street View is all about:

[via Twitter]

Annotate your YouTube videos

... as reported by Google Blogoscoped:

To add an annotation to one of your own videos, check your videos listing and hit the “Edit Annotations” button next to one. You will be able to insert three types of annotations; “speech bubbles,” “notes,” and “spotlights.” Also, you can add a link with each annotation. Those URLs may only point to YouTube though (I wonder if that’s greedy or if there’s a good reason for this). This feature also allows you to create interactive videos – like a video ending with a multiple choice question, leading to different other videos depending on where you click. Combining several of these videos, it would be possible to create a full-featured choose-your-own-adventure game... neat!

Depth Reporting's old look restored

I learned today that Depth Reporting's recent problems were caused by Google's blogroll widget, which I have removed from my page. That allowed me to restore Depth Reporting's old template. I considered elaborating on Google's lousy way of handling problems like these, but don't have the patience right now, and will be moving on.

Apologies for Depth Reporting being out of commission

Depth Reporting, which is hosted by Google's Blogger, was down for more than a day for reasons that are still unclear to me. Apparently others are having similar problems, but as is typical with Google, they haven't responded to my request for help or offered an explanation. They tell users to report problems in their forums, but actually replying to those reports doesn't appear to interest them. Their status page, more than 8 hours after I submitted my request for help, mentions only "a small number" of users reporting "broken feeds," which doesn't fit my situation. I restored Depth Reporting by reverting to one of Google's classic templates, as suggested by a blogger in their forums, but all of my customizations have been lost. Depth Reporting also seems to be having problems displaying images.

To be continued ...

Add Data to Google Spreadsheets Using Forms

Not everyone is comfortable entering data in a spreadsheet, but anyone who has been online has filled out a form. Now you can gather data in Google Spreadsheets using forms. From the Google announcement earlier this month:

Google Spreadsheets has a new feature that lets you create a form to accept data. When you go to the Share tab, there's a new option to "invite people to fill out a form". The form is very simple and can be customized by changing the order of entries, their labels and the type of answers. It's also a nice way to get feedback people who wouldn't normally collaborate on a spreadsheet.

You can create forms from spreadsheets or using this URL. To keep track of your forms, add this gadget to iGoogle.

Google Static Maps API

You can now generate a static Google Map just by constructing a URL. There's a wizard to make it even easier. These are image maps — not the zoomable, clickable Google Maps you typically see — which Google says are ideal for multimedia-heavy Web sites because they'll load fast.

The URL to make the map above, which shows the location of the CJ, looks like this:

http://maps.google.com/staticmap?center=38.2463,-85.7608&zoom=9&size=200x200&maptype=mobile\&markers=38.2463,-85.7608,greenc|&key=ABQIAAAAinb4lNGZMYVUNPnvHp7HRRT2yXp_ZAY8_ufC3CFXhHIE1NvwkxSUeiWoopzbMAgQgXOhmRYBQWWYaA

Just stick it in an image tag and you're done.

'Course, if you do this, you will get a map that looks, as a certain programmer/journalist points out, "so 2005."

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. writes for the official Google Blog on mountaintop removal

Kentucky is ground zero for this issue. Kennedy's post highlights a Web site that uses Google Maps and Google Earth to bring the issue home:

If the American people could see what I have seen from the air and ground during my many trips to the coalfields of Kentucky and West Virginia: leveled mountains, devastated communities, wrecked economies and ruined lives, there would be a revolution in this country. Thanks to Google Earth, you can now visit coal country without ever having to leave your home.

Every presidential candidate – and every American – ought to take a few seconds to visit an ingenious new website created by nonprofit organizations in Appalachia that lets you tour the obliterated landscapes of Appalachia. By entering your zip code into this amazing new website, you learn how you're personally connected to mountaintop removal. Americans from Maine to California can see these mountains and the communities that were sacrificed to power their home. This puts a human face on the issue by highlighting the stories of families living in the shadows of these mines.

Google News and the dearth of local news

Google upgraded its news search this week so you can type in a city name or ZIP code to find news for where you live:

While we’re not the first news site to aggregate local news, we’re doing it a bit differently -- we're able to create a local section for any city, state or country in the world and include thousands of sources. We’re not simply looking at the byline or the source, but instead we analyze every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located.

Google is years behind Topix, which is partly-owned by Gannett, The Courier-Journal's parent company. You've been able to search for local news by ZIP code at Topix since 2004. On its blog, Topix greeted the Google news by doing some math:

If you take the totality of news created from the mainstream press (newspapers, radio, television stations), and do the back of the napkin math for all the local stories generated on a daily basis, here's what you get

1,440 local daily papers X 6 stories a day = 8,640
2,303 news radio stations X 3 stories a day = 6,909
1,686 television stations X 4 stories a day = 6,744
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Total local stories per day 22,293
Number of populated US ZIP codes 32,500

Topix concluded that "Local news is not a search problem."

We started by trying to add more sources. We added government, weather and industry sources, and then we added 25,000 blogs to the mix to see what we'd get. And, pretty much, they still didn't provide the breadth of coverage around local news, especially around small towns.

...

The conclusion our users pointed us to, by sending us hundreds of stories a day through our feedback form, was that there wasn't enough coverage of most areas by the mainstream press or the blogsphere, and that the real opportunity was to become a place for people to publish commentary and stories -- because no one else was going to do it.

So, we launched the Topix forums, and two years and 25 million posts later, Topix has gone from being merely an aggregator of local news, to becoming the home of local voice on the web

I've been mostly disappointed with sites that purport to offer tailored, local news because I haven't found enough compelling content to keep me coming back. Google's latest offering needs work too. I typed in both my city name and ZIP code and got nothing, which seems more than a little ham-handed. And I have no clue why last night I typed google news in the search box and got nothing:

But it works fine today.

Regardless, if it's really true that we're all just narcissists who only care about ourselves, then maybe what we're really looking for is the future of news search as predicted by Google Blogoscoped.

Make Google Charts with URLs

Yesterday Google released a tool that lets you make bar, pie, line and scatterplot charts and Venn diagrams just by specifying the information in a URL. You can then embed the charts in a Web page.

Here's an example:

The URL to create this chart looks like this:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=bvs&chs=200x125&chco=ff0000&chd=t:70,66,55,73&chtt=Homicides&chxl=0:|2004|2005|2006|2007&chxt=x

That looks nasty, but here's how it breaks down:

cht=bvs
makes a vertical bar chart

chs=200x125
specifies the chart size in pixels

chco=ff0000
is the chart color

chd=t:70,66,55,73
is  data for the chart. In this case the number of homicides in Louisville per year (I haven't checked this carefully, so assume the numbers are imaginary)

chtt=Homicides
the chart title

chxl=0:|2004|2005|2006|2007
the chart axis label

chxt=x
The location of the label. In this case, on the x axis.

To include the chart on a Web page, you include the URL as the src attribute in an HTML image tag, like so:

<img src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=bvs&chs=200x125&chco=ff0000&chd=t:70,66,55,73&chtt=Homicides&chxl=0:|2004|2005|2006|2007&chxt=x" />

There are many, many options, so you can make some pretty sophisticated charts, plotting up to a maximum of 4,096 values. Google says it originally built this tool for Google Finance.

Google limits you to 50,000 queries per user per day, so I'm not sure it's useful for a newspaper site, but that's more than enough for most blogs and personal Web sites.

Google Maps now show terrain

View Larger Map

The Google Lat Long Blog explains:

These maps focus on physical features such as mountains, valleys, and vegetation. They contain labels for even very small mountains and trails and are enhanced with subtle shading that can often give a better sense of elevation changes than a satellite image alone.

For example, we think Terrain maps may just be the best way to experience the grandeur of the Grand Canyon or to plan your hiking trip on the Appalachian Trail. And of course, big mountains look really cool. Better yet, you can mix them with custom maps from our users, such as a map of highest points in the United States or a guide to the Pyrenees mountains.

To see the new style, simply click on the "Terrain" button in the upper-right corner of the map.

Multiple people can also now collaborate on making a Google map and you can import KML, KMZ and GeoRSS files.

Biases and Restrictions for Google Search

The Google Operating System, an unofficial blog offering news and tips about Google, writes about "Biases and Restrictions for Google Search." Google filters and reorders its results in multiple ways, and the blog explains how you can change that by editing the URL.

Ten Easy Steps to Learn About a Place with Google Earth

... from the Google Earth Blog.

Reflections of a Newsosaur: "Google's plan to poach election traffic"

Prompted by this Google page:

Australia Votes signals a significant strategic shift on the part of Google to become a primary web destination, as opposed to restricting itself to its historic role as a supplemental, though highly valuable, research tool. As such, it eventually could compete head to head with not only the likes of CNN, the Washington Post and all the other media biggies but also with the tiniest of tiny weeklies.

...

The Google election project, an elegant mashup of Google’s arsenal of search, mapping, video, widget and other technologies, is a preview of how all but the most technologically recalcitrant consumers will expect to get political – and many other types of – news in the future. In addition to delivering a wealth of well-packaged election information and interactive tools, Google has created four content-pushing widgets and a number of ways for users to express their opinions via forums and home-brewed video.

1,070,000 search results, give or take 1,069,741

Matt Waite wrote on his blog the other day that the new Web site he created, Politifact, already had "more than 1 million results in Google" after only two weeks online. That number sounded incredible to me, so I Googled Politifact, and found that Google did indeed report, in the blue bar at the top, that the results of that search were the first 1-100 of more than 1 million:

So I scrolled through the results to see which sites these were, and, when I got to the bottom, saw links for only five actual pages of results:

And when I clicked on the link for page 5, lo and behold, suddenly there were links for only three pages of results on the bottom. And at the top, on the blue bar where just minutes before it had reported 1,070,000 results for Politifact, it reported only 259:

You can try almost any search term and get wildly inconsistent counts each time you search. SearchEngineWatch demonstrated it using the nonsensical term djkfdkjfdkjddfdfdd. And a Frenchman demonstrated it using variations of Chirac and Sarkozy.

It's been obvious for a long time that Google search results are an entirely bogus form of evidence, as this 2004 MediaBistro article pointed out:

Writers crafting trend stories—or, for that matter, profiles, or lifestyle pieces, or reviews, or even news items—are always desperate to prove the popularity of whatever hot new thing they're identifying. They could do some reporting, of course, or find some statistical research, but instead they're technologically smitten, like everyone else. What's a simpler, or faster, way of quantifying a trend than typing a key word or phrase into Google? Type in almost any person, place, or thing, and Google will bounce back to you a neat numerical value that calculates that person, place, or thing's importance to this world. The writer can sit back and let the search engine's brainy algorithms do all the work—and then even pick up some tech-savvy bonus points, too. Google, and not polls or pie charts, has emerged as a journalist's best friend—and best source.

Not that Journalists are alone in this. Judges do it too:

A New York federal judge said a Google search had helped him decide that 24 Hour Fitness should not receive an injunction against a competitor that owned 24hourfitness.com. The judge said a search for "fitness industry" on the Internet revealed more than 1.6 million hits, mainly linking to sites related to physical training and conditioning.

Google Fight even purports to pick winners based on which search terms get the most results.

Google isn't the only purveyor of flaky numbers. When Robert Scoble found similar inconsistent results from MSN and Yahoo, it prompted him to ask, "Why aren’t there any truth in advertising laws for search engines?"

The problem is that we just don't know what's going on behind the scenes, so to cite any number churned out by a search engine as proof of something without knowing how it was generated is specious. It's a particularly egregious form of confirmation bias. The only Web page count we should trust is the one where we've used our own eyeballs to scrutinize each and every page.

After I pointed out the discrepancies, Matt did the search again and updated his blog to show that the Google results "now stands at 687,000."

"Regardless," he added, "the point remains — your Google hit count is a largely meaningless milestone, except to show that the site has spread widely."

Except it doesn't even show that. When I searched for Politifact again today, it showed 446,000:

Tomorrow, who knows?

Import and republish data using Google Spreadsheets

Google Spreadsheets now lets you import data from other sites, which you can then crunch and republish. You can import data from comma- and tab-delimited files, XML files, Web tables or lists and Google Reader.

To test it I copied the URL for the monthly civilian unemployment rate from FRED into a Google Spreadsheet cell, using one of Google's new import functions:

=ImportData("http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/UNRATE/downloaddata/UNRATE.csv")

Then I created a chart from the data, made the sheet public, and copied the code to embed the chart into another Web page. The chart is dynamic, so when the underlying data in Google Spreadsheets changes, the chart changes too. You can also choose to embed the spreadsheet itself, although in this case I chose not to. Each public spreadsheet also has its own feed, so someone can subscribe to your data and be notified automatically whenever it's updated.

All this is easy to do, assuming you know something about spreadsheets and data files. My biggest gripes were that editing the spreadsheet was balky on my modest home DSL connection, and I couldn't figure out how to make dates appear on the x axis of my chart (perhaps because there were too many). I also tried embedding the chart using the awful Google Page Creator, but it didn't work.

I don't know enough to know if this will be a viable way to serve data on the newspaper's Web site, but combined with the ability to manipulate spreadsheets with code, Google is become an ever more intriguing data platform.

Hans Rosling: "Unveil the beauty of statistics"

Hans Rosling, one of the founders of Gapminder, delivered an impassioned speech to an OECD forum on statistics recently, encouraging governments to make data more freely available. Gapminder's software, Trendalyzer, was recently acquired by Google. It is a superb tool that lets you compare countries over time by various statistical measures. Rosling, who is Swedish, said the hardest thing about building Gapminder was not getting the money, coming up with ideas, or making the technology work -- it was borrowing databases from tax-funded institutions. Such "database hugging" by public institutions hampers innovation, he said. He told how when he visited the U.S., he brought his American Express card to Wall Street, assuming that at such a citadel of capitalism, he would have to pay to walk the sidewalks. Instead, he could stroll unhindered to the door of the New York Stock Exchange. He said governments need to make data freely available so innovators and entrepreneurs can experiment with it. "When sidewalks are free, why can't we make statistics to be the intellectual sidewalks of human societies? … There's no reason to charge for it."

Participants in the forum, which was in Istanbul, did sign a declaration (PDF) that declared "Official statistics are a key 'public good' that foster the progress of societies."

Choose your own route with Google Maps

Google shows how you can use its new map feature that allows you to choose your own route between two points by dragging and dropping. You drag and drop the roads you want to take and Google Maps automatically updates the directions, including the distance traveled and the estimated time the trip will take. I tried it, experimenting with different ways to drive to and from work, and found it difficult to get the route I wanted on tightly packed city streets. I kept missing my mark and my route would wander off in strange ways. It's easier if the route you're planning gives you more room to work, such as a trip from Mountain View, CA, to Kirkland, WA, as demonstrated in the video.

You're a Nobody Unless Your Name Googles Well

So says The Wall Street Journal:

In the age of Google, being special increasingly requires standing out from the crowd online. Many people aspire for themselves -- or their offspring -- to command prominent placement in the top few links on search engines or social networking sites' member lookup functions. But, as more people flood the Web, that's becoming an especially tall order for those with common names. Type 'John Smith' into Google's search engine and it estimates it has 158 million results.

For people prone to vanity searching -- punching their own names into search engines -- absence from the first pages of search results can bring disappointment. On top of that, some of the 'un-Googleables' say being crowded out of search results actually carries a professional and financial price.

I'm guessing this isn't a problem for Rupert Murdoch.

3D graphics with GE-Graph

The free GE-Graph plots data graphically on Google Earth. Here's an example: I took 2000 Census data on median home price household income by ZIP code for our circulation area, used Microsoft Access to combine it with a file that gave the latitude and longitude for each ZIP code, and cut and pasted it into GE-Graph. GE-Graph can also import data from a file or you can type it in, and it has various options for choosing colors, labels and transforming the data. You then click "Run" and it exports the data as KML, Google's mapping format. This was the result:

The taller the bar and the darker the color, the higher the median home price median income. You can zoom in and out and rotate the graphic to view it from different angles in Google Earth. This is a kind of poor man's 3D Analyst Extension, which does this and much, much more, but costs $2,495.

UPDATE: Oops. The perils of working too fast and not taking enough time to check your work: I mistakenly uploaded a 3D image of home prices instead of median income, so I've corrected this post to reflect that.