Simon Willison’s Weblog

tesseract-ocr. Open source OCR, sponsored by Google. I just sat in on a talk on this at OSCON and the complexity of the problem is pretty incredible.

# 26th July 2007, 8:23 pm / ocr, tesseract, google, oscon, oscon07

YouTube Scalability Talk. Kyle Cordes’ notes on a Google Tech Talk on scaling YouTube by Cuong Do.

# 14th July 2007, 10:26 pm / youtube, scaling, kylecordes, google, googletechtalk, cuongdo

Google Translate (beta). Google’s beta translator based on statistical analysis of things like the United Nations corpus. I have no idea how long this has been available; it isn’t linked from their homepage.

# 3rd July 2007, 4:43 pm / google, translation, languages, internationalisation, i18n

Google Health Advertising Blog: My opinion and Google’s (via) A follow up to the post I linked to earlier.

# 1st July 2007, 9:22 pm / google, google-health, health, sicko

Does negative press make you Sicko? (via) Google’s Health Advertising Blog encourages the healthcare industry to buy ads against Sicko as part of an “issue management campaign” to help “educate” the public. Creepy.

# 30th June 2007, 6 pm / healthcare, google, creepy, sicko

My Google Tech Talk on OpenID. I gave this extended and improved version of my “Implications of OpenID” talk at Google on Monday. Fast turnaround on the video!

# 28th June 2007, 8 am / speaking, openid, google, techtalk, google-video

google-diff-match-patch (via) Robust algorithms to perform the operations required for synchronizing plain text, in Java, JavaScript and Python.

# 9th June 2007, 6:15 pm / neilfraser, google, open-source, diff, java, javascript, python

Semi-synchronous replication for MySQL (via) Google’s patch for MySQL which enables more reliable master-slave replication (a transaction isn’t committed until at least one slave has replicated the data).

# 5th June 2007, 10:07 pm / mysql, google, open-source, philippearson, replication, masterslave

Google Gears DB Abstractions. Here come the ORMs.

# 4th June 2007, 8:54 am / javascript, google, google-gears, db, orm

Cross Domain Frame Communication with Fragment Identifiers. Google are using this crazy iframe/fragment trick for their new Mapplets API.

# 31st May 2007, 2:15 pm / google-maps, google, hack, javascript, iframes

Apollo will include Google Gears technology. Looks like Google really worked on the partnerships for this one.

# 31st May 2007, 8:30 am / google-gears, offline, javascript, apollo, google

Dojo Offline on Google Gears. “The great news is that the Dojo crew were in the loop wrt this project, and Brad has ported Dojo Offline to use Google Gears as the base platform.”

# 31st May 2007, 8:28 am / brad-neuberg, dojo, google-gears, dojooffline, offline, javascript, google

RSS Bling goes Offline with Google Gears. Google Gears is Google’s new offline JavaScript framework. Dion Almaer (a Google employee) has a nice example of code using Google Gears on Ajaxian.

# 31st May 2007, 8:27 am / google-gears, google, ajaxian, javascript, offline, dion-almaer

The Google Maps Street View team? They’re posing outside the Googleplex so I’m guessing this is the team that built it.

# 30th May 2007, 12:29 pm / streetview, google, google-maps, easteregg, googleplex

Howto: Google Maps Street View outside US. Add “&gl=us” at the end of the URL to avoid the evil geo IP restriction and play with Google’s latest toy.

# 30th May 2007, 7:40 am / google-maps, google, streetview, geoip

Top XSS exploits by PageRank. Yahoo!, MSN, Google, YouTube, MySpace, FaceBook all feature.

# 29th May 2007, 10:07 pm / yahoo, msn, google, youtube, facebook, xss, pagerank, security

Google Image Search does faces (via) The undocumented imgtype=face parameter. Kind of creepy.

# 28th May 2007, 8:08 pm / google, imagesearch

The Oxford Guide free WiFi plotted on Google Maps. The guide offers a geocoded Atom feed which can be directly plotted on a Google Map.

# 26th May 2007, 9:55 am / google, google-maps, theoxfordguide, oxford, wifi

A whole new experience for Google Analytics. I absolutely cannot wait to get my hands on the new interface. Maybe I’ll finally be able to find the search referrals page!

# 8th May 2007, 9:09 pm / google-analytics, google, jeff-veen

Introduction and Yahoo! Pipes. The official Google Maps API blog describes how to plot KML output from Yahoo! Pipes.

# 3rd May 2007, 10 pm / yahoo, google, google-maps, yahoopipes, xml, maps

Seven JavaScript Techniques You Should Be Using Today (via) Sound advice from Dustin Diaz, who is now a Googler.

# 24th April 2007, 8:20 am / google, dustin-diaz, javascript

Google AJAX Feed API (via) Simple cross-domain proxy to allow JavaScript to access any publically addressable syndication feed, with the same logic as Google Reader providing normalisation.

# 18th April 2007, 5:29 pm / google-reader, ajax, javascript, crossdomain, google, rss, feed, atom, syndication

Google Reader Theme. Jon Hicks’ beautiful alternative skin for Google Reader, installable as a user stylesheet for various browsers.

# 16th April 2007, 10:03 pm / google, google-reader, jon-hicks, userstylesheet, skin

Google My Maps: Bodeans. I’ve been talking about how useful a simple tool for creating custom maps would be for ages... looks like Google beat me to it. Here’s one I created showing the location of Bodeans, an excellent Kansas-style BBQ joint in Soho, London. It’s a shame the URLs suck.

# 5th April 2007, 5:40 pm / mymaps, maps, london, google-maps, bodeans, bbq, soho, google

How to beat Google, part 1. Rick Skrenta with 12 steps to taking on Google in the search engine space, including some great insights in to smart UI design.

# 27th March 2007, 12:02 am / ui, rickskrenta, google

New Open Source Utility Library for the Google Maps API (via) Google are taking a hybrid approach to development on their Maps API—an open source utility library layered on top of their closed source, obfuscated core code.

# 23rd March 2007, 9:09 pm / google, google-maps, open-source

My photos tagged “cheese” on a Google Map. You can paste a Flickr GeoRSS feed directly in to the Google Maps query box.

# 23rd March 2007, 1:55 am / georss, flickr, google-maps, cheese, google

KML and GeoRSS support added to the Google Maps API. Since Flickr can output GeoRSS, this means you can now plot your Flickr photos on a Google Map (if you’re so inclined).

# 23rd March 2007, 1:03 am / flickr, georss, kml, google, google-maps

Two visions. It looks like Mark Pilgrim is going to be joining Hixie at Google.

# 20th March 2007, 8:32 am / mark-pilgrim, ian-hickson, google

Google Video: How do I enter transcripts? Neat feature of Google Video I hadn’t seen before: you can upload timestamped transcripts of your videos. Anyone seen a video that uses these?

# 12th March 2007, 10:44 pm / video, google-video, subtitles, transcripts, google