Long famous for allowing employees to spend 20% of their time on experimental work, Google is experimenting in public with a number of projects that give a nod to the mashup ethic. It was a very busy summer for Google; from their Google Apps for Your Domain launch to the partnership with Intuit to the acquisition of biometric company Neven Vision. It doesn’t look like things are slowing down going into the Fall.
Here’s an overview of some of the most recent offerings in the spirit of the mashup that the company has made available.
Google Gadgets Set Free
Formerly trapped largely in Google Desktop, more than 1200 Google Gadgets (widgets) were set free today for embedding in any web page. Site publishers can now make it even easier for their visitors to get driving directions, view Picasa photo albums or play hang-man. (Ok, how about a multi-video player widget, live sports scores or a police and fire map from Incidentlog.com.) Widgets are going to be everywhere next year, as they help non-technical site publishers pull in rich, dynamic data from all around the web and place it on one page. There should be even more interesting Gadgets on the way; the Google Gadgets Awards for Students contest ends November 1st and is being judged by people like Chris Anderson of Long Tail fame and Commander Taco from Slashdot.
Multi-site Search
The forthcoming issue of Time Magazine includes an interview with Google’s Marrissa Meyer, who says the company is building a multi-site search tool. It may look like Rollyo, the Yahoo! Search Builder or Windows Live Search Macros. That would be very useful and I hope it comes out soon.
SearchMash
Google launched a new site this week with hardly a word of Google branding, called SearchMash.com. It looks like one place to put lots of user interface experiments in one site. It’s basically the Google web and image search results displayed in a different way, including drag and drop reordering (hardly as useful yet as the Live.com search scratchpad), an Ajax “infinite scroll” that lets users stay on one page to view a long list of results and a right click drop down menu for options to display a URL. The best part of this is the option to request a new search for your search term inside the domain of the page you click on. That way once you find a site that discusses something once, you can easily view all the instances of that term being used everywhere in the site. Image search results are also displayed on the right side of SearchMash pages.
Ajax Search API 1.0
Google’s Ajax Search API version 1.0 was released today. The API makes it easy for site publishers to put a nice looking Ajax search box for video, news and maps embedded in their own pages or build applications on top of the API. See this page for an example of the video search, click on any of the still frames to see the feature in action.
Today’s release supports news search, restricting those searches to a list of news sources, local map search now including Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, and the ability to access the API from behind intranet firewalls. Google is also now experimenting with putting sponsored links in the Ajax API search results. They aren’t charging advertisers for those clicks, but it is a sign that the strategy is under serious consideration.
All of these are signs that Google is staying current with the times. Yahoo! is moving in the same direction with everything from HackDay to an internal incubator to ongoing acquisitions of innovative mashup loving startups, the new BBAuth tool and a Yahoo! Mail API. Facebook is opening in even more ways. The mashup ethic is clearly no longer a fringe idea by idealistic small fries – it’s being embraced substantially by many of the web’s biggest players. Who’s doing the most? Probably Yahoo! Who’s doing the least? MySpace appears dead set against the whole thing.
Now that they are getting into the game, the next question will be whether companies play nice with everyone else and our data.
Who needs to show a map or driving directions on their website? Cmon..
Ali, fair enough. I added some better examples.
Ali:
A small company, event details, schools.
I can think of tons of reasons…as TD said alone. Perfect for colleges, schools, companies – people coming for interviews…
We use the Google AJAX search on the Salesforce blogs, mashed up with home-grown autocomplete feature based on Typepad. The search looks smooth and slick, and our users have one, integrated experience. The video search looks great as well, and I can see us using that once we’re done uploading videos from our upcoming conference. Can’t Wait!
Ali:
Think local amateur sports teams. I’ve played ice hockey my whole life and traveling out of state to another teams hometown is a pain in the ass. Its even worse when the directions suck. Most of these teams have a website (most of them suck, but thats irrelevant) and having driving direction would be a life saver.
Sure, we could all just goto maps.google.com and get directions, but having half of the work done for us would be lovely
Good , Good coverage Marshall .
most of those widgets looks cheesy but there are a few cool ones. after going to hackday i’d say yahoo has a better network of developers but im glad to see google is putting up a good fight.
As the original discoverer of Google’s version, I hope you don’t forget the original SearchMash, at http://mashproxy.com/search
It’s an open-source Java-based mashup, that implements secure cross-domain page fetches to tell you if the search results are stale or dead, and gives you an instant preview.
Well I know I’m excited. Anything that’s free is good for me.
http://www.goodersites.com
“The forthcoming issue of Time Magazine includes an interview with Google’s Marrissa Meyer, who says the company is building a multi-site search tool. It may look like Rollyo, the Yahoo! Search Builder or Windows Live Search Macros. That would be very useful and I hope it comes out soon.”
I did that already… http://blogs.op...chfeedrlabs.php
Also works for Yahoo, Libve.com, altavista…domains you search over are pulled in from a web feed, such as a linklist from delicous, or wink, or h20 playlists.. or the links scraped from a page (if you suppluy the URL).
I’m also testing searches over sites that link to a page (http://blogs.op.../linkSearch.php) ro a realted (as delicious understands it) to a page (http://blogs.op...latedSearch.php)
tony
It’s about time Google looks are multi-site search. While this has existed for some time now, thanks to search operators, unlike these sometimes confusing rules that exist to redefining and advancing your search query, sites like Rollyo take the technicality of these functionalities out and, as such, make it much more user-friendly.
Like you say, “All of these are signs that Google is staying current with the times.” If they want to stay ahead of competition, they’d better.
So, who won the contest? any news about it? speaking of gadgets I also found this site the Widgets and Gadgets it also features the latest and hottest gadgets nowadays.
Nightline says you read all that comes in. recently my wife was not admitted to the E Room at the local hospital for 3 hours. She could have died from a very painful 3 hour wait even though she was already set up even to the point of an I V in her arm for a pain from the prescribing Dr. Too many people go to get a cold or cough fix the er is over crowded. WHAT WOULD MARISSA DO or contact. PLEASE HELP. We need to fix this. Some day this could be a family member of yours.