Google Chrome May Be Pre-installed On New PCs

How did Internet Explorer become the number one browser in the world? Simple – it came with every new computer you purchased, pre-installed and ready to go. Now it seems Google is contemplating doing the same with their browser, Google Chrome. According to Google VP, Product Management, Sundar Pichai, the browser’s beta period will end in January and then they “will probably do distribution deals,” he says.

In an article that ran in yesterday’s The Times, Pichai revealed details on what he called Google’s plans to make Chrome the browser of choice for the everyday user. A big part of that plan includes distribution deals with computer manufacturers.

“We could work with an OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) and have them ship computers with Chrome pre-installed,” he was quoted as saying. Thanks to the anti-trust rulings that came out of the IE / Netscape battle back in the 1990’s, there’s nothing to prevent Google from doing deals of their own with computer makers, if they desire.

Once Google has a glitch-free version of Chrome sometime early next year, “we will throw our weight behind it,” said Pinchai. “We’ve been conservative because its still in beta, but once we get it out of beta we will work hard at getting the word out, promoting to users, and marketing will be a part of that.” (A link on Google’s homepage might help with those marketing efforts, but not as much as we previously thought).

Pichai also noted that versions of Chrome for Linux and Mac computers will become available in the first half of next year which would allow the browser to work on almost 99% of computers worldwide.

(source)

Keyboard Shortcuts to Navigate Through Google Search Results

A post on the Official Google Blog reminded us of a recently launched search experiment from Google called Accessible View. With this opt-in experimental version of Google.com, you can navigate through your search results using keyboard shortcuts. For those of you who are already heavy users of Google Reader, the inbox for the RSS-obsessed, these shortcuts will be very familiar to you. Although designed for people with disabilities, we gave the keyboard shortcuts a whirl to see if it made sense to use them on a regular basis.

In the Google Accessible View search experiment, you can navigate through the search results using the following shortcuts (see below).

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Current keyboard shortcuts include:

j or DOWN  –  Selects the next item.
k or UP       –  Selects the previous item.
l or RIGHT   –  Moves to the next category (results, sponsored links, refinements).
h or LEFT    –  Moves to the previous category (results, sponsored links, refinements).
<Enter>       –  Opens the selected result.
/                 –  Puts the cursor in the search box.
n                 –  Moves to the next result, and fetches more results if necessary.
p                 –  Moves to the previous result, reloading earlier results if necessary.
=                 –  Magnifies current item
–                 –  Shrinks current item
A                –  Switches to Accessible Search Results
W               –  Switches to regular Web Search Results

The “A” switches you Accessible Search Results, which identifies and prioritizes search results that are more easily usable by blind and visually impaired users. The “W” switches you back to regular results.

(source)

Google started indexing scanned documents – A picture of a thousand words

A scanner is a wonderful tool. Every day, people all over the world post scanned documents online — everything from official government reports to obscure academic papers. These files usually contain images of text, rather than the text themselves.But all of these documents have one thing in common: someone somewhere thought they were they were valuable enough to share with the world.

In the past, scanned documents were rarely included in search results as we couldn’t be sure of their content. We had occasional clues from references to the document– so you might get a search result with a title but no snippet highlighting your query. Today, that changes. We are now able to perform OCR on any scanned documents that we find stored in Adobe’s PDF format. This Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology lets us convert a picture (of a thousand words) into a thousand words — words that can be searched and indexed, so that these valuable documents are more easily found. This is a small but important step forward in our mission of making all the world’s information accessible and useful.

While we’ve indexed documents saved as PDFs for some time now, scanned documents are a lot more difficult for a computer to read. Scanning is the reverse of printing. Printing turns digital words into text on paper, while scanning makes a digital picture of the physical paper (and text) so you can store and view it on a computer. The scanned picture of the text is not quite the same as the original digital words, however — it is a picture of the printed words. Often you can see telltale signs: the ring of a coffee cup, ink smudges, or even fold creases in the pages.

To people reading these documents, the distinction between words and pictures of words makes little difference, but for a computer the picture is almost unintelligible. Consider a circle. Should it be read it as a zero, the letter ‘O’, just a circle, or the ring from my coffee cup? People learn to answer this kind of question very quickly, but for the computer it is a painstaking and error-prone process.

To see our new system at work, click on these search queries. Note the document excerpt in the search results, along with the full text presented after the ‘View as HTML’ link:

[repairing aluminum wiring]
[spin lock performance]
[Mumps and Severe Neutropenia]
[Steady success in a volatile world]

[original story: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/picture-of-thousand-words.html]

Google is Now an OpenID Provider

OpenID, an increasingly popular mechanism for creating and managing a single identity across the Internet. On Monday, Microsoft announced that it would give every Windows Live user an OpenID account, and today, Google announced a very similar plan.

Google will allow web services to join a limited test of an API based on the OpenID 2.0 protocol that will give Google Account users the option to sign in to websites with their Google credentials and without having to sign up for a new account at those sites.

Among the launch partners for this new API are Zoho, Plaxo, and Buxfer.

Google Launches Google Apps Labs and Welcomes Third Party Developers

Lately, Google has rolled out new features for its experimental Google Labs functionality in Gmail at a rapid pace. Today, Google announced a similar product that will bring experimental features to enterprise and small business customers: Labs for Google Apps. These apps are built on top of the Google App Engine, which launched in April, and include Google Moderator, Google Code Reviews, and Google Short Links.

If you are using Google Apps for your Domain, you can head over to the Google Solutions Marketplace and start adding these features to your account now, though you will have to change some of your DNS settings before they can become functional.

Google Code Reviews

Google Code Reviews is, as the name implies, aimed at developers. It allows developers to share code for review and propose changes.

Google Moderator

Google Moderator is an application that Google first released for the App Engine just about a month ago. Moderator is basically a forum for group discussions and Q&A sessions, with the ability to vote questions and answers up and down.

Google Short Links

Short Links is a URL shortener like TinyURL or snurl, but works with your own domain name. This allows you to turn complicated and long URLs into short, more memorable ones.
More to Come

According to Google, these are just the first three in a long list of products that will make their debut in Labs for Google Apps. Google also intends to open this platform up to all App Engine developers, but it hasn’t provided a timetable for this yet.

(by Frederic Lardinois, source)

Google Android vulnerable to drive-by browser exploit

The Google Android operating system is vulnerable to a serious security vulnerability that allows malicious hackers to launch drive-by browser attacks, according to alert from a security research outfit.

Technical details of the vulnerability, which occurs because Google Android uses an unpatched open-source software package, is being kept under wraps until a patch is available.

Google was notified of this issue on October 20th, 2008.

According to a warning from Independent Security Evaluators (the company that found the first iPhone code execution flaw), this particular security vulnerability “was known and fixed in the relevant software package,” but Google used an older, still vulnerable version.

The Google Android OS powers the T-Mobile G1 by HTC, a device that’s currently in stores in the United States.

• A user of an Android phone who uses the web browser to surf the internet may be exploited if they visit a malicious page. Upon visiting the malicious site, the attacker can run any code they wish with the privileges of the web browser application. We have a very reliable exploit for this issue for demonstration purposes.

The researchers, however, acknowledged that the impact of this attack is “somewhat limited” because of the way Google Android is designed.

• A successful attacker will have access to any information the browser may use, such as cookies used for accessing sites, information put into web application form fields, saved passwords, etc. They may also change the way the browser works, tricking the user into entering sensitive information. However, they can not control other, unrelated aspects of the phone, such as dialing the phone directly.

(by Ryan Naraine  – Ryan Naraine is a journalist and social media enthusiast specializing in Internet and computer security issues. He is currently security evangelist at Kaspersky Lab, an anti-malware company with operations around the world.)

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