YouTube's App for iPad

To contact us Click HERE

Three months after releasing an app for iPhone, YouTube updated it and added an interface optimized for iPad. The lack of a built-in YouTube app for iPad created an opportunity for other developers to come up with their own YouTube apps and some of them are pretty good.


YouTube also updated the app to fill the entire 4-inch display of the iPhone 5 and added AirPlay support. The initial version of the app didn't have AirPlay support and asked users to enable AirPlay mirroring, an inefficient method to play videos on an Apple TV. The new version supports AirPlay, but it uses a non-standard video player and videos stop playing on the Apple TV when you close the app. Another side-effect is that you still can't use the background audio trick that lets you play songs or any other videos while opening another app or after locking the device. Both features are available in Apple's old YouTube app and YouTube's mobile web app.


Obviously, YouTube's app has a lot of features that weren't available in the built-in app: recommendations, unified video history, voice search, closed captions, activity feeds. Unfortunately, the iPad app has a pretty low information density and most sections show fewer videos than Apple's YouTube app. For example, the search feature shows only 4 results at a time in the landscape mode, while Apple's app displayed 12 results. YouTube offers some advanced search options: sorting by date, ratings or view count, finding recent videos and filtering by duration, but the interface tries too hard to be consistent with the desktop interface, while ignoring that a tablet has a small screen. Apple's App Store app from iOS 6 made a similar mistake by showing a small number of results at a time.

Google Now's Research Card

To contact us Click HERE
The Google Search app for Android 4.1+ has been updated with new cards for events nearby, boarding passes, walking and biking activity, birthdays.

There's also a new card for research topics. Google tries to find in your search history a list of related queries. If you've been researching a topic, it's likely that you've tried different versions of a query and you've clicked many search results. Google Now shows a card with other useful pages from the same topic. It's interesting to notice that Google can find the name of the topic and shows a page that groups results for various queries. Google also includes a "history" section with pages you've already visited.

For some reason, the pages generated by Google return an error messages if you try to open them using a desktop browser. You need to change the user-agent to open pages with URLs like https://www.google.com/now/topics/t/LONGID.


"The research topics card appears when your recent Web History includes several searches related to a single topic – such as a trip you're planning – and Google detects relevant webpages that you may not have found yet. For this card to appear, you must have Web History turned on for the account you use with Google Now. To explore more links that may be relevant to the topic, touch Explore at the bottom of the card. From the list of links, touch the History tab to view a summary of your recent Web History related to this topic," informs Google.

YouTube's New Interface

To contact us Click HERE
After so many posts about YouTube's experimental interfaces, it's time for the public release. The new interface is rolled out to everyone and you no longer have to change your YouTube cookie to try it.


"On YouTube video always comes first, and with this new design the site gets out of the way and lets content truly shine. Videos are now at the top of the page, with title and social actions below. Also, playlists have been moved up, so you can easily browse through videos while you watch. Now when you subscribe to your favorite channels, we will add them to your Guide and make them available on every page of the site, and on your mobile device, tablet, and TV," explains YouTube.

The guide is actually a sidebar that's now available on every YouTube page and lets you check your subscriptions, your playlists and the video history. You can also see a list of other videos from the previous page, so you can quickly watch another search result, a different video from the same channel or another video from the homepage.

Google's Card-Style OneBoxes

To contact us Click HERE
Google updated the desktop OneBoxes for definitions and local time to match the card layout from Google Now. The same layout is also used in the mobile search UI for most Google OneBoxes.



What's unique about the cards? They're much bigger, they include a lot more information, more white space and more distinctive headers. They stand out more and they're harder to ignore.

{ Thanks, Milivella, Arpit, Mikhail. }

New SafeSearch Settings for Google Image Search

To contact us Click HERE
Google tried to simplify a feature using some clever algorithms, but made some people unhappy. Google's SafeSearch settings have always been difficult to understand and Google replaced the three options that were available (strict filtering, moderate filtering - default, no filtering) with only two options (filter explicit results, don't filter explicit results - default).

Here are the old filtering options:

- "Strict filtering filters sexually explicit video and images from Google Search result pages, as well as results that might link to explicit content."

- "Moderate filtering excludes sexually explicit video and images from Google Search result pages, but does not filter results that might link to explicit content. This is the default SafeSearch setting."

- "No filtering turns off SafeSearch filtering completely."


The new filtering options are even more difficult to understand. The default option is supposed to disable filtering, but it's actually a combination of "moderate filtering" and "no filtering", depending of the query. For innocent queries like [sherilyn fenn movies] Google switches to moderate filtering since it's not very likely that you're asking for explicit content. If you add some unambiguous keywords like "xxx" to the query, Google actually disables filtering.

Here's how Google describes the new settings: "In the SafeSearch Filtering section, click the checkbox to filter sexually explicit video and images from Google Search result pages, as well as results that might link to explicit content. If you choose to leave it unchecked, we will provide the most relevant results for your query and may serve explicit content when you search for it." So Google may show explicit images, but only if it's obvious that you're searching for it. No algorithm is perfect, so you'll probably find many examples when this doesn't work as intended.


A Google representative told CNet: "We are not censoring any adult content, and want to show users exactly what they are looking for - but we aim not to show sexually-explicit results unless a user is specifically searching for them. We use algorithms to select the most relevant results for a given query. If you're looking for adult content, you can find it without having to change the default setting - you just may need to be more explicit in your query if your search terms are potentially ambiguous. The image search settings now work the same way as in Web search."

For now, Google only changed how SafeSearch works for google.com, so the old settings are still available at google.co.uk and other country-specific Google sites.

Continuing the quest for future computer scientists with CS4HS

To contact us Click HERE
Erin Mindell, Program Manager, Google Education

Computer Science for High School (CS4HS) began five years ago with a simple question: How can we help create a much needed influx of CS majors into universities and the workforce? We took our questions to three of our university partners--University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon, and UCLA--and together we came up with CS4HS. The model was based on a “train the trainer” technique. By focusing our efforts on teachers and bringing them the skills they need to implement CS into their classrooms, we would be able to reach even more students. With grants from Google, our partner universities created curriculum and put together hands-on, community-based workshops for their local area teachers.

Since the initial experiment, CS4HS has exploded into a worldwide program, reaching more than 4,000 teachers and 200,000 students either directly or indirectly in more than 34 countries. These hands-on, in-person workshops are a hallmark of our program, and we will continue to fund these projects going forward. (For information on how to apply, please see our website.) The success of this popular program speaks for itself, as we receive more quality proposals each year. But success comes at a price, and we have found that the current format of the workshops is not infinitely scalable.

This is where Research at Google comes in. This year, we are experimenting with a new model for CS4HS workshops. By harnessing the success of online courses such as Power Searching with Google, and utilizing open-source platforms like the one found in Course Builder, we are hoping to put the “M” in “MOOC” and reach a broader audience of educators, eager to learn how to teach CS in their classrooms.

For this pilot, we are looking to sponsor two online workshops, one that is geared toward CS teachers, and one that is geared toward CS for non-CS teachers to go live in 2013. This is a way for a university (or several colleges working together) to create one incredible workshop that has the potential to reach thousands of enthusiastic teachers. Just as with our in-person workshops, applications will be open to college, university, and technical schools of higher learning only, as we depend on their curriculum expertise to put together the most engaging programs. For this pilot, we will be looking for MOOC proposals in the US and Canada only.

We are really excited about the possibilities of this new format, and we are looking for quality applications to fund. While applications don’t have to run on our Course Builder platform, we may be able to offer some additional support to funded projects that do. If you are interested in joining our experiment or just learning more, you can find information on how to apply on our CS4HS website (or click here).

Applications are open until February 16, 2013; we can’t wait to see what you come up with. If you have questions, please email us at cs4hs@google.com.

Understanding Google

To contact us Click HERE
Fortune has an interview with Larry Page, Google's CEO. There are many questions about Apple, competition, managing the company, but some of the most interesting answers revolve around the word "understand".

"If we're going to do a good job meeting your information needs, we actually need to understand things and we need to understand things pretty deeply," says Larry Page. That's why Google has a single privacy policy for most of its services, that's why Google Search uses SSL when you're logged in, that's why Google experiments with combining data from multiple services, that's why Google+ was built and that's why Google values data so much. To understand things deeply.

"What you should want us to do is to really build amazing products and to really do that with a long-term focus. Just like I mentioned we have to understand apps and we have to understand things you could buy, and we have to understand airline tickets. We have to understand anything you might search for," continues Larry. There's a long list of things Google needs to understand, but your preferences help Google return better results and even anticipate your searches.

"I think in order to make our products really work well, we need to have a good way of sharing. We had 18 different ways of sharing stuff before we did Plus. Now we have one way that works well, and we're improving." If there's an easy way to share things online, this helps Google understand your preferences.

"We see the opportunity to build amazing products that are more than any of those parts. So one of my favorite examples I like to give is if you're vacation planning. It would be really nice to have a system that could basically vacation plan for you. It would know your preferences, it would know the weather, it would know the prices of airline tickets, the hotel prices, understand logistics, combine all those things into one experience. And that's kind of how we think about search," concludes Larry.

The search engine that returned the same results for all users is now a thing of the past. This worked for simple questions, for navigational queries, but it doesn't work for complex questions, for vague queries, for recommendations. Instead of showing the same results for [italian restaurant], Google can personalize them based on your location, your favorite food, your reviews and the reviews written by your friends, your Latitude check-ins.

The new Google tries to understand you and that's the secret behind Google+. Obviously, it's still about search, but it's a deeply personalized search. Google also goes beyond keywords and tries to understand concepts and the relation between them. The Knowledge Graph and the Social Graph define the new Google.