Hosni Mubarak in Google Timeline View

Google currently has a cool experimental search feature which provides a timeline for search queries. All you have to do is write "view:timeline" before or after your search query in the Google search box. An interesting search query I've tried using timeline view was for Hosni Mubarak. The timeline clearly shows a rise in 1981 which as the year Hosni Mubarak became President of Egypt. The other even higher rise in the timeline is in 2005, that was the year when Mubarak was reelected as President of Egypt in a first ever multi-candidate election to be held in Egypt. This new experimental timeline feature in Google search is way cool.

Google Business Plan Competition

Google.org is supporting a Business Plan Competition in Tanzania. I hope Google supports a similar program in Egypt. Perhaps Google may be sponsoring the 2008 Business Plan Competition in Egypt.

Arabic Spelling Check in Gmail

I was thrilled today while replying in Arabic to an email sent to me when my hand automatically pointed and clicked on the check spelling link in gmail to find that it was actually able to detect and check the spelling of my Arabic written email! That was really thrilling, for I had been really frustrated for long finding that the spelling checker in gmail supported English but not Arabic. Google is bringing more and more support for Arabic in its products. I hope the day comes when Google opens up AdSense for content for publishers of Arabic content as well.

Google Developer Tools

Google has attacked Microsoft head-on through it's Google Apps which is positioned to take over Microsoft Office. Although Google has not create an operating system to compete with Microsoft Windows, yet, it has tried to push the open source Linux operating system. Google also has given big support to Firefox to compete with Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser. Google Desktop and its Gadgets are also present a strong blow attempting to take ground from Microsoft.

How about Microsoft Visual Studio? Will Google be trying to give a blow to that too? Well, Google has already started this by releasing the Google Web Toolkit. What's interesting is Google's between-the-lines announcement today that it needs to hire engineers at its Chicago branch to join other "Chicago engineers [who] are currently working on Open Source and developer tools." So it seems Google is focusing more and more on releasing developer tools. Let's see if that will have any effect on Microsoft Visual Studio's future.

Google Reveals Search Spikes

Google Hot Trends is a new exciting feature of Google Trends that Google has recently announced. Hot Trends is a daily monitor of unpredictable anomalies or spikes in search patterns. A search query that suddenly receives a much higher than usual amount of hits would be one featured at Hot Trends. In Google words:

Hot Trends aren't the search terms people look for most often -- those are pretty predictable ... . Instead, the Hot Trends algorithm analyzes millions of searches to find those that are deviating the most relative to their past traffic. And the outcome is the Hot Trends list.

The part I like the best about Hot Trends is showing an amalgam of information about a hot query: a graph showing the spike in the number search queries, news articles and blog posts related to the query as well as web results for the query. Makes the idea of mashups resurface again in our minds as a viable hot 'trend' possibly marking the future of the web.

I just hope this list does not become to popular that it would make a loopback effect similar to the one experienced at Google Video due to the presence of the popular videos list.

Autosave Now in Blogger

It's interesting that now Blogger has the autosave feature. When writing a new blog post, Blogger automatically saves your post every minute. It's quite handy and much neater than the previous "Draft" button. The autosave feature is already present in Googld Docs & Spreadshets.

Yahoo Mail Messenger Merge

When Google made it possible to chat from with gmail without the need to use Google Talk it was considered a breakthrough and a really creative idea. Now Yahoo is following suit by allowing members to chat from within their Yahoo mail without needing to use Yahoo Messenger.

Unlike in the case of gmail where you can chat from within your gmail account and still be signed in at your Google Talk, Yahoo signs you out of Yahoo Messenger in order to be able to chat from within your Yahoo mail. I love the chat interface in gmail way better. Perhaps Yahoo email chat will evolve over time, but right now I find it very poor in turms of usability.

Google Spreadsheets Now Have Charts

At long last, Google has added charts functionality to Google Docs & Spreadsheets. The feature has been in high demand and now the wait is over. It is interesting that Google's addition of charts to its online spreadsheets application comes exactly one month after Google's acquisition of data visualization software from Gapminder.

Google Egypt Hiring QA Engineer

I was excited to know about the Software QA Engineer vacancy at Google Egypt. I hope that Google Egypt would follow this one day soon with positions for Software Developers as well.

Google Video Talk

Google tried to downplay its acquisition of Marratech's video conferencing software saying that it "will enable from-the-desktop participation for Googlers in videoconferencing meetings wherever there's an Internet connection." Yet it sounds to me like Google is actually aiming at adding video chat features to Google Talk, a feature which has been present in both Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Messenger for quite a while.

Measure Your Street Now!

It's amazing. You can actually grab a ruler and measure the length of your own street using Google Earth! I thought that feature was reserved for the Pro version only, but it turns out it is available in the free version of Google Earth too. The Pro version however adds ability to measure areas.

So have some fun, find your own street using Google Earth then use the ruler feature to measure how long it is. Amazing!

Google PowerPoint

30 days ago I've been asking if Google will be adding a presentation component to its Google Docs & Spreadsheets web application suit as a parallel application to Microsoft PowerPoint.. Google finally gives us the answer, yes they are.

Google HotJobs?

Looks like Google once again is going after Yahoo's share of online services. Google might be entering the online jobs market, competing with Yahoo! HotJobs.

Some time before Google launched its calendar service, there were reports of aggressive activity by Google bots chewing up ferociously on calendar sections found on people's web sites. I was startled two days ago when I found the googlebot repeatedly reading my resume at emurse. I believe that could be an indicator that Google is planning to enter into the online job market as has Yahoo!

Yet as Google Calendar is no where the same as Yahoo Calendar, I expect Google Jobs to be way different and cool. So let's wait and see when and if this will turn out to be true. After all, Google's mission is to organize the world information, and sure resumes and job vacancies are a large part of highly sought after information in this world.

PHP and Python Creators Working for Yahoo and Google

It's interesting that Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP, has been employed by Yahoo! as an Infrastructure Architecture Engineer since September 2002.

It's more interesting that as of October 2005, Guido van Rossum, creator of Python, has been hired by Google and became a Google software engineer.

Genena Mall on Google Maps!

If you search Google Maps for Genena Mall you will be taken to the Genena Mall location.

How does Google achieve this? Easy. I have created a small map including Genena Mall, Fatma El Zahraa Mosque and a small garden not far from them called Al Ferdaws Garden. I then put this map over at Google Maps. You will find blue rectangles that I have drawn around each of these three places.

But how have I managed to do this? Well, Google has just announced the ability to create your own maps very easily over at Google Maps. This new interesting feature makes it so easy to creat your own map and put it at Google Maps for everyone to see. It even appears in the search results as mine appears when you search Google Maps for Genena Mall. Here is how to use Google's exciting new My Maps feature.

One Billion Web Pages Analyzed

Just above a year ago, Google made an interesting study in which it took a sample of over 1 billion web pages and analyzed them to discover how HTML tags are actually being used on the Web. The results of such study might be interesting to web designers and web developers. Have a look at those enlightening web authoring statistics from Google.

Google and Microsoft Fight for Egypt Students

Egypt's Business Today magazine has an interesting article this months titled Bit-by-Bit in which it sheds light on how Google is following in the footsteps of Microsoft trying to grab a share in Egypt's huge education pie.

Reusability Redefined

Stuck with a piece of code that you want to figure out how to write in order to add that feature to your application? Get unstuck by tapping into the massive number of lines of code that have already been written by other developers all around the world. All you have to do is just use Google Code Search to look for a piece of code similar or identical to the one you want to write. You can even specify in which programming language you want the code to be!

The open source code has always been there, but the idea of instantly having access to any part of it and having Google pinpoint the exact piece of code you are looking for from among this enormous body of code is what makes the whole idea amazing. No need to reinvent the wheel anymore. Now that's what I call real usability of code.

Google AdSense in Arabic

Google supports AdSense for Search in Arabic. I hope the day comes when Google finally starts to support AdSense for content in Arabic as well. I believe it would be a tough thing for them though. First of all there is the linguistic difficulty of making being able to figure out what the content of the Arabic web page is about. Then comes the other even more difficult problem of managing click fraud and similar malicious abuse of the AdSense program.

Data Visualization from Google

With Google's latest acquisition, Google will be bring data visualization to a much "wider audience." Is that why Google Docs & Spreadsheets lacked charts till now? Was it a wait for an incredibly better way of visualizing data? Will Google add a presentation component to it's arsenal of applications similar in a way to Microsoft PowerPoint?