Google Translate and Google Squared Expand Services

Image via CrunchBase

Official Google Blog: This week in search 5/14/10

This week, we announced a number of new search enhancements.

Google Translate learns and speaks new languages
This week, we launched 5 new "alpha" languages on Google Translate — Armenian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Georgian and Urdu. We also extended our support for spoken translations to 29 more languages. With these launches, you can now translate text, webpages and documents between 57 languages, and hear translations spoken in 36 languages. For many search queries where you want to translate a word or a phrase, we offer a translation powered by Google Translate directly in our search results. We also recently added romanization to this feature — when translating to or from a foreign language, you can now see the translation written phonetically in roman characters.

Example searches: [translate how are you? to chinese] or [translate обезьяна]

Twenty more languages in Google search get virtual keyboard
Recently, we announced that we've integrated virtual keyboards into Google Search homepages in 35 languages. Virtual keyboard lets you type directly in your local language script in an easy and consistent manner, no matter where you are or what computer you’re using. Feedback is always important to us, and we were excited to get more than three thousand votes for other languages you felt the keyboard should be launched in. Today, we're happy to announce that we are adding Virtual Keyboard to another 20 languages — making it now available in 55 languages.

For those of you who speak a language we don't yet support, we're hard at work adding the virtual keyboard into more languages listed in Google Language Tools page. You can also vote for the languages you'd like us to add next. We always appreciate your feedback as we continue our efforts to help you input text in your desired languages as easily as possible.

Example languages we added this week:

• Amharic
• Bengali
• Danish
• Estonian
• Gujarati
• Kannada
• Lithuanian
• Latvian
• Maltese
• Marathi
• Nepali
• Norwegian
• Oriya
• Punjabi
• Brazilian Portuguese
• Romanian
• Sanskrit
• Tamil
• Telugu
• Tigrinya

Finding short answers

Image by Search Engine People Blog via Flickr

This week, we introduced a new feature that brings the technology of Google Squared right to your search results. Squared makes it easier to highlight answers for fact-based queries, so you can get more accurate answers, faster. Now, you'll see these answers right at the top of your search results, brought to you from across the web. And, we've also made sure this feature works great on mobile browsers.

Example searches: [timezone in nevada] or [when was jean-jacques rousseau born]

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned next week for more search news.

Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow

Related articles by Zemanta

• Top 10 Google Services that Use Google Translate (mt-soft.com.ar)
• Google Translate Annoyance (thaibrother.com)
• Google Goggles Gets Text Translation: See C'est Bon! [Google] (gizmodo.com)

Google Squared: Your Search Results in Spreadsheet Form

Mashable, Jennifer Van Grove, June 3 - At Google's Searchology event in May, Google announced the impending arrival of Google Squared, a Labs project that would return search results in spreadsheet form.

Today it appears as though Google Squared has been released out into the wild. Now your search results can take a completely different form, so you can remove content, add suggested columns of your own, and even save your squares for future access.

Since Google Squared is just your search results in column and row form, you're best off making queries on groups of things. So, you can search for television shows and get back a list of shows, accompanying images, descriptions, language, and run time in a format that's much easier to consume than typical search results. You can add additional columns and Google will try to help you fill in the blanks.

The cool thing about Google Squared is that columns are dynamic, so they mesh with the content displayed in the squared results. Cell content is also customizable, so clicking on a cell will let you search for other possible values and display a confidence level (eg. low confidence). We're also big fans of the fact that you can save your Squares, a small but important feature that could turn this into a quick and powerful utility for research.

If you stump the square, you can manually enter a few of the items you want to see compared, and Google () will automatically work to find similar entities and build out a comprehensive square.

Based on our initial use, we see Google Squared being a potentially huge time saver for professionals and consumers who need to do quick comparisons. It's incredibly useful if you know what you're looking for, ie. photo sharing sites, and are hoping to see side-by-side comparisons.

Though we wouldn't say that Google Squared is revolutionary, or able to compete with these 5 things Wolfram Alpha does better than Google, we do think that it's an interesting departure from the status quo of standard list search results. Plus, with the recent release of Bing, it's important that Google continue to innovate and experiment to maintain their dominance in search.

Source - http://mashable.com/2009/06/03/google-squared/

See also - http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2009-06-03-n25.html