Helping you help us help you

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As I mentioned in a previous post, we've taken several measures to help differentiate legitimate API traffic from bad requests. To help us serve you better, I'm pleased to announce a new way for you to identify your request as harmful. Beginning today, please include the &evil=true parameter in your API requests if you're one of the bad guys.

How does this work in practice? Here's an example query which lets Google know that you're intending to use the API for nefarious purposes. This way, we can respond to your request in the appropriate manner as efficiently as possible.

Note: In order to encourage adoption as quickly as possible, we are requiring all bad requests to include the evil bit by the end of today, April 1.

Media RSS support added to the Feed API

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More and more sites are adding support for MediaRSS to include images, videos and other types of multimedia files. Today, we're announcing that the Google Feed API now includes this metadata in the response. This content is now included in the JSON and XML results returned by the API. For more details on the result format, check out the documentation.

Please note that complete MediaRSS content is generally only available in feed entries newer than February 1, 2010.

Questions? Comments? If you're attending Google I/O, come meet the team and learn more about the Feed API at our Office Hours. If you can't wait that long, there's always our IRC channel and support forum.

Restricting by licenses now available in the Image Search API

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I'm always amazed at the creative ways developers use Google's APIs. I'm always pleased when we are able to add a new feature to the API, as I know that someone, somewhere will do something cool and unexpected with it. The latest addition is to the Image Search API. You can now restrict results by various licenses applied to each image.

There are two different ways to use this feature. In the JavaScript API, you can restrict your results to one of four common licenses (just like on Google Image Search). This is done using the setRestriction method, after creating your Image Search searcher. Here's how to restrict to images which have been labeled for reuse with modification:

var searcher = new google.search.ImageSearch();searcher.setRestriction(google.search.ImageSearch.RESTRICT_RIGHTS,                        google.search.ImageSearch.RIGHTS_MODIFICATION);

You can experiment with a live example of this in our Code Playground.

If you're using the JSON API, you can use the as_rights optional parameter to tell the API to include or exclude certain attributions. To perform the same restriction as above, try adding this to your requests:

&as_rights=
 (cc_publicdomain|cc_attribute|cc_sharealike|cc_noncommercial).-(cc_nonderived)

For a full list of the attribute combinations for each type of license, perform an appropriately restricted search on Google Image Search's advanced search and take a look at the as_rights parameter in the URL on the results page.

Note: Images returned with this filter may still have conditions on the license for use. Please remember that violating copyright is strictly prohibited by the API Terms of Use. For more details, see this article.
Please come visit our IRC channel and support forum and let us know how you've used this feature in your site or app!

Microsoft Surface Makes a Good First Impression

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Forget everything you know about Microsoft Surface as it is no longer an expensive coffee table with a touch screen that you could have expected to see in hotel lobbies. Microsoft Surface is now a 10.6” consumer tablet – much like the iPad – and it runs on Windows 8.

Microsoft Surface – A Windows 8 Tablet

The Microsoft Hardware unit has so far limited itself to designing keyboards, mice, and other computer accessories but this is probably the first time that they have designed a consumer computer tablet in-house. The build quality of existing Microsoft hardware is top-notch and if these press photos are any indication, the new “Post PC” device should be no different.

The details are too thin to compare this Windows 8 tablet with the iPads and the Galaxy Tabs but few things stand out.

Unique features

The Surface tablet runs on Windows 8 and hence you should be able to use any of your existing software on the tablet.

The included USB port will help you connect devices – like the external hard drives, USB microphones, digital cameras, or USB modems – without requiring “special” accessories. The touch cover (image) doubles as a keyboard with a built-in track pad.

Pen Input for Handwriting

The tablet editions of previous versions of Windows had excellent handwriting recognition capabilities. The Surface Tablet ships with a pen and features “palm block” meaning when the pen tip is touching the screen, it would ignore the touch of the palm and the fingers. Surface could turn out to be a great writing device albeit less heavy.

Availability

Microsoft says that Surface would be made available around the same time as Windows 8 so the release date is likely to be October or November this year. The units will initially be sold only in the Microsoft Stores in U.S. and there’s no word on pricing yet.

Also see: How much will Microsoft Surface cost?

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This story, Microsoft Surface Makes a Good First Impression, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 18/06/2012 under Microsoft Surface, Windows 8, Gadgets.

Related posts:

1. Looking for a Good Puzzle Game for Windows? Microsoft Tinker is here
2. Microsoft StartKey – Windows Desktop on a USB Drive
3. Microsoft Second Light Adds Another Dimension to the Surface Table
4. Microsoft Surface – Press Photos
5. How much will Microsoft Surface cost?

Now You Can Change your Facebook Page URL

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When you create a Facebook Page, the system assigns a random URL to your page that looks something like this:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/IceCream/123456

When 25 or more users have “liked” your Facebook Page, you can choose an easy-to-remember username (or vanity URL) for your Page that may looks like this:

https://www.facebook.com/IceCream

Once you have claimed the URL (or username) for your Facebook Page, there was no option to change it. The only workaround was that you delete the old Facebook page (thus losing all the likes) and recreate a new one with the desired username (provided it is available).

Well that old policy seems to have changed recently and Facebook Page owners can now change the usernames of Pages that they are admin of. To get start, Open any of your Facebook Pages, go to Edit Page –> Update Info and click the “Change Username” link under the Username option. See video demo.

Also see: How to Create Custom Facebook Pages

Changing your Facebook Username – Things to Know

Before you change the URL, here are few things you should know:

• When you pick a new URL for your Facebook Page, the old URL will no longer work (returns a 404). Therefore, make sure that you update any existing links in your web pages, email signatures, etc. that point to the old Facebook Page URL.
• Be very careful when choosing the new URL for your Facebook Page because you are allowed to change the username of any Page only once.
• Facebook Pages ignore periods (.) in the URL and they are also case insensitive. Thus facebook.com/icecream is same as facebook.com/ice.cream or even facebook.com/Ice.Cream.

The following video will quickly walk you through the process.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFgdrothnFM

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This story, Now You Can Change your Facebook Page URL, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 27/06/2012 under Facebook, Internet.

Related posts:

1. What Other Companies Can Learn from Nestle’s Facebook Page
2. How to Change Your Name on Facebook
3. Send a Message to All Fans on a Facebook Page
4. Verifying Ownership of a Facebook Page
5. Should You Create a Facebook Group or a Facebook Page?

Translate more Indic languages with the updated Google Translate for iPhone app

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Back in June, we launched five new experimental Indic languages for Google Translate on the desktop and mobile web app. Today, we’ve updated the Google Translate for iPhone app to add these new alpha languages: Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu. This brings the total number of languages supported by the app to 63 languages.



The updated app supports the ability to view dictionary results for single words and to display romanizations for these new Indic languages. So even if you can't read the script the words are written in, you can still take a shot at reading the translation.

Since these are still experimental alpha languages, you can expect translations be less fluent and include many more untranslated words than some of our more mature languages—like Spanish or Chinese—which have much more parallel data to power our statistical machine translation approach. Despite these challenges, we believe users will find these new languages helpful and we're excited to be making them available through the Translate app.

Google Translate for iPhone now supports text translation among 63 languages, voice input in 17 of those languages, and text-to-speech in 24 of them. Get the latest version of the Google Translate for iPhone app from the App Store now and start breaking down language barriers wherever you are!

Posted by Jeff Chin, Product Manager, Google Translate

Sometimes it’s easier just to write it

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With our most recent update to Google Translate for Android, we’ve added an experimental new input feature: handwriting on your touchscreen.
Maybe you’d like to see if three 木 make a 森, but you don’t have a Japanese keyboard installed? Just use the handwriting icon

Our goal is to break down the language barrier, all the time, everywhere. By adding handwriting input directly into our Android app we hope to help you get translation done even more quickly and easily. Sometimes you don’t know how to say what you want translated, sometimes you can’t type it, and sometimes it’s easier just to write it. We think of handwriting on the touchscreen as another natural input that you may want to use to complement the keyboard, microphone, or camera.



This is still an experimental feature. It’s available in Chinese and Japanese, and you can enable it for English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish if you like. (We currently only support single-character input for Chinese and Japanese.) Just as with speech recognition and our translations themselves, our handwriting recognition happens in the cloud, allowing us to continually improve accuracy without requiring you to download new versions of the app.

Download Google Translate in Android Market — it’s available for tablets and mobile phones running Android 1.5 and up. Then, you can easily find out whether 自 really means ‘server rack with a Wi-Fi antenna’.

Posted by Daniel Keysers, Software Engineer

Tutmonda helplingvo por ĉiuj homoj

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Today, we are adding Esperanto to Google Translate, making it our 64th supported language.

Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof started his quest for an easy-to-learn language shared by all people in the 1870s and first published the ideas in 1887 with his book Unua Libro. The concept of a common language spread quickly, and initial reactions to Esperanto have ranged from suppression to enthusiastic embrace. Now, 125 years later, Esperanto has hundreds of thousands of active speakers, millions of people with some knowledge of the language, and even a few hundred people who learned it from birth, taught by their parents.

Esperanto and Google Translate share the goal of helping people understand each other, this connection has been made even in this blog post. Therefore, we are very excited that we can now offer translation for this language as well.

The Google Translate team was actually surprised about the high quality of machine translation for Esperanto. As we know from many experiments, more training data (which in our case means more existing translations) tends to yield better translations. For Esperanto, the number of existing translations is comparatively small. German or Spanish, for example, have more than 100 times the data; other languages on which we focus our research efforts have similar amounts of data as Esperanto but don’t achieve comparable quality yet. Esperanto was constructed such that it is easy to learn for humans, and this seems to help automatic translation as well.

Although the system is still far from perfect, we hope that our latest addition helps you to learn more about Esperanto’s history and culture. Translation to and from Esperanto will soon be available on translate.google.com, in our mobile web app, and in the Google Translate app for Android and iOS.

Posted by Thorsten Brants, Research Scientist, Google Translate

An easier way to type in Japanese, Vietnamese, and Hebrew

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Knowing what you want to translate is sometimes only half the battle. You may have a letter from your secret admirer sitting in front of you, but if you can’t type the words into Google Translate the meaning can remain elusive.

Typing in languages which use different character sets can be a frustrating problem in computer labs, internet cafés, and sometimes even on home computers if standard Latin alphabet keyboards are the only option available.

To make typing in these languages easier we began including virtual keyboards and transliteration input methods in Google Translate last year, and we’ve been working to expand that support over time. Today we’re happy to announce three major additions to our input methods: Japanese, Vietnamese, and Hebrew language support.

To use transliteration input methods, just select the ‘Allow phonetic typing’ option when typing in Google Translate.
Since releasing transliteration support for these languages a few days ago, we’ve noticed significant improvements in the the speed of input (for instance, Vietnamese text input has become 20% faster with the new input method) which we hope to see translate into a better experience for everyone.

Keep an eye out over the next few months as we add support for more languages.

Would you like to use Google’s transliteration input methods or virtual keyboards across the whole web? Try out our Chrome extension, which includes transliteration for over 20 languages and virtual keyboards for 70 more.

Posted by C. Andrew Warren, Associate Product Manager, Internationalization Team

Now you can polish up Google’s translation of your website

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Since we first launched the Website Translator plugin back in September 2009, more than a million websites have added the plugin. While we’ve kept improving our machine translation system since then, we may not reach perfection until someone invents full-blown Artificial Intelligence. In other words, you’ll still sometimes run into translations we didn’t get quite right.

So today, we’re launching a new experimental feature (in beta) that lets you customize and improve the way the Website Translator translates your site. Once you add the customization meta tag to a webpage, visitors will see your customized translations whenever they translate the page, even when they use the translation feature in Chrome and Google Toolbar. They’ll also now be able to 'suggest a better translation' when they notice a translation that’s not quite right, and later you can accept and use that suggestion on your site.

To get started:

1. Add the Website Translator plugin and customization meta tag to your website
2. Then translate a page into one of 60+ languages using the Website Translator

To tweak a translation:

1. Hover over a translated sentence to display the original text
2. Click on 'Contribute a better translation'
3. And finally, click on a phrase to choose an automatic alternative translation -- or just double-click to edit the translation directly.

For example, if you’re translating your site into Spanish, and you want to translate Cat not to gato but to Cat, you can tweak it as follows:

If you’re signed in, the corrections made on your site will go live right away -- the next time a visitor translates a page on your website, they’ll see your correction. If one of your visitors contributes a better translation, the suggestion will wait until you approve it. You can also invite other editors to make corrections and add translation glossary entries. You can learn more about these new features in the Help Center.

This new experimental feature is currently free of charge. We hope this feature, along with Translator Toolkit and the Translate API, can provide a low cost way to expand your reach globally and help to break down language barriers.

Posted by Jeff Chin, Product Manager, Google Translate