Google Flu Trends available for 16 additional countries

As we all know Google has been working on project "Flu Trends" if we may call it in which they were monitoring flu related searches on Google. Through experience they have managed to achieve a high level of accuracy in identifying the true flu activity in a country.


All this while Google Flu Trends was available in the United States. One of the most important aspects of Google Flu Trends is that they filter out terms that may be popular because people hear about them in the news or read about them in newspaper but these may not be the people who actually have flu symptoms. So in the recent outbreak of Swine flu, they do not use in their models terms like "swine flu" since people are more likely to type that into Google because they want to know more information about it.

Since the model has fair level of accuracy, Google has announced the expansion of Google Flu Trends to 16 additional countries and is now available in 37 languages. So Google Flu Trends is now available for Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, France, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine and the United States

In November 2008 Google Flu Trends was launched in the United States after finding a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. This was achieved by tracking the popularity of certain Google search queries which now successfully estimates the level of flu in near real-time.

For more information you may watch following video:

Quick view of PDFs in your Google search results

During your search experience on Google you would have come across many links with PDF extension a click on which would have resulted in your Adobe or other PDF viewer application getting opened and you viewing the file. The catch here is that if you do not have any PDF viewer application, Google offered you an alternative which was to view the file as HTML in the browser itself. This though was a faster alternative it lead to loss of the formatting from the original PDF, such as graphics, tables, fonts and other elements.

Today, Google has added a new link to "Quick View" PDF documents in your browser itself with the formatting intact. The new links are based on the same technology that's available in Google Docs and Gmail. Google had rolled this technology out to the search results page since July, and as of today they have added "Quick View" links to more than 50% of the PDFs in their index.

For example, here is a search result for the term "Form 16"

A click on "Quick View" will open up the PDF right in your browser with graphics, formatting and tables preserved. Following is what it looks like after opening:

YouTube has a New Logo : 1 Billion Views Per Day!

If you visit YouTube today you will see a small but unmistakable change on the site. Look on the Top Left and you will see a new YouTube logo. Its basically the same Logo with '1 BN' appended to it with a Tag line below it which reads '1 billion views per day!'

Now that's what you call ATTITUDE. It speaks volumes for this site which became extremely popular post acquisition by Google.

New Minimalist Google homepage

Google is supposedly carrying out experiment for its homepage showing only logo and search box. There will be no links appearing on top and bottom of the page until you move your mouse over the page.

To try out this experiment visit google.com and type the following into the address bar (Mind you it should not be your local google site viz google.co.in, etc)

javascript:void(document.cookie="PREF=ID=abac7a90f5a3784b:LD=en:NR=10:TM=1254990196:LM=1254990236:S=uB6F4jDnMP_DuxtT;path=/; domain=.google.com");

After typing the above into the address bar hit return and reload the page.

Following would be the minimalist look and feel of your google.com

On mouse over the page following will be the normal look and feel of google.com

Internet problems plague India

There seems to be a problem with internet connectivity in India today. Since morning the speed of access strangely has been very slow. Though there is no official news on this yet but there is a possibility of another undersea cable cut.

As per Internet traffic report Asia's current index trend stands at 74 way below Global index trend of 84.

In the recent past we have seen number of massive internet disruptions due to undersea cable cuts.

Yahoo launches "Its Y!ou" campaign in India

Yahoo has lauched it "Its Y!ou" campaign in India with a bang. It has tied up with leading English language newspapers viz. The Times of India, Hindustan Times, DNA, Live Mint etc. to release an interesting front page print edition today. Its a huge yellow advertisement as can be seen on the left.

In an interview to Economic Times, Yahoo India’s MD Arun Tadanki said
"Through this campaign we want to clearly position Yahoo! as the centre of peoples’ online lives. Yahoo will be the focal point of everything that they do on the internet. It is important to see this not as a campaign or a burst of advertising but as a larger promise to users. What’s going to break in the coming days is the first step of an exercise spread over several years.

We are definitely not following any other major online brands in going for a revamp as in our case this has been in the works since the beginning of the year. We are doing this now because 2009 has seen a lot of internal re-energising of Yahoo! to make ourselves more relevant to consumers. The full roll-out will take place on October 5. Till such time, the changes are in the beta/trial phase."

Will Gmail sink in the Wave?

On 27th May 2009 Google publicly demonstrated Google Wave for the first time at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco. This product was touted as "the email of the future". With Google Wave, Google tried to reinvent the inbox, blend e-mail, instant messaging and many more features. The very basic premise on which this product was born was how email would look if it was born today instead of 50 years back.

Now that the baby is born and we are looking at the possible present form of email service, would Google go ahead and kill Gmail? In the long run it would obviously not make any sense for Google to run 2 different websites. Promoting 2 separate brands offering the same core value is always gonna be a costly affair. Look at Android, after launching it Google decided to have Chrome OS. Eventually it will just have Chrome as their standard OS for all the platforms.

Make no mistakes, I am not suggesting that Google will replace our email ids to xyz@gwave.com coz replacing millions of email ids would be a daunting task. What we may end up witnessing is a convergence of Wave and Gmail. To make Google Wave universally acceptable, Google may discontinue www.gmail.com and force us to visit wave.google.com for login. This maybe the only change, but this one change may be bring up huge opportunities for Google. It may help them beat Yahoo, MSN, etc. in IM service. It may help them manage the increasing threat from facebook and twitter.

So is it time to say bye bye Gmail???