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It now no longer called Gmail Beta — Gmail will now sufice — as Google officially takes off the Beta label from Gmail which was in beta for 5 years. Not any great update, but the beta culture had been all with rage with most of the Google products and have formed an internet convention on its own. Think and beta and you think of Google. And interestingly, Google also launched a function called “Back To Beta” which puts back the beta sticker to your Gmail so it has “never” left beta.

In case, you did not know, Michael Jackson, the “King Of Pop” just passed away yesterday and we are really sad on the loss of such a great pop-star. Many users on the web must have felt the same too, as Google searches about Michael Jackson exploded on Google yesterday. Here is a chart showing the search trend yesterday and here is Google explaining the trend:

Search volume began to increase around 2:00pm, skyrocketed by 3:00pm, and stabilized by about 8:00pm. As you can see in Google Hot Trends, many of the fastest rising search queries from yesterday and today have been about Michael Jackson’s passing (others pertained to the death of another cultural icon, Farrah Fawcett). People who weren’t near a computer yesterday turned to their mobile phones to check on breaking news. We saw one of the largest mobile search spikes we’ve ever seen, with 5 of the top 20 searches about the Moonwalker. The spike in searches related to Michael Jackson was so big that Google News initially mistook it for an automated attack. As a result, for about 25 minutes yesterday, when some people searched Google News they saw a “We’re sorry” page before finding the articles they were looking for.

This undeniably show the amount of global interest on Michael Jackson and how Google could have been better prepared to deal with it. Here is a song video in his tribute — Heal The World that we found was one of his best songs. More song and videos can be found on his YouTube Channel.

All For Good is the latest initiative by Google to bring volunteerism to the next level. Many organizations offer community service, but the problem is that it takes much time and effort to find all these organizations across many sources. All For Good helps to ease this problem by providing a search platform for users to help you find these volunteer activities within their community as well as share these events with their friends. We liked this initiative as it is a great open and free platform for people to find volunteer activities and for organizations to reach out to them. The ability to connect with social networking as well as search also makes All For Good a good model on how Web 2.0 can improve charity. What is your take on All For Good: be sure to comment and tell us.

Technology is advancing faster than you can think — the web, social networking, blogging has helped people to find information, communicate and interact with each other faster and better than ever. Now Google is taking a leap forward in the age of search through a new technology that allows landmark recognition. Google describes it as follows:

How did we do it? It wasn’t easy. For starters, where do you find a good list of thousands of landmarks? Even if you have that list, where do you get the pictures to develop visual representations of the locations? And how do you pull that source material together in a coherent model that actually works, is fast, and can process an enormous corpus of data? Think about all the different photographs of the Golden Gate Bridge you’ve seen — the different perspectives, lighting conditions and image qualities. Recognizing a landmark can be difficult for a human, let alone a computer.

Our research builds on the vast number of images on the web, the ability to search those images, and advances in object recognition and clustering techniques. First, we generated a list of landmarks relying on two sources: 40 million GPS-tagged photos (from Picasa and Panoramio) and online tour guide webpages. Next, we found candidate images for each landmark using these sources and Google Image Search, which we then “pruned” using efficient image matching and unsupervised clustering techniques. Finally, we developed a highly efficient indexing system for fast image recognition. The following image provides a visual representation of the resulting clustered recognition model:

As you can see, it’s a research paper and not a new product yet (don’t be disappointed), however it might become a reality in time to come. This technology currently enables computers to quickly and efficiently identify images of more than 50,000 landmarks from all over the world with 80% accuracy. If Google can jack it up to 90-95%, then it will be the next big thing since text search. Maybe next on the list: video recognition?

The problem with existing RSS feed measurement services nowadays is that — there is never a best way to count all the RSS subscribers out there who have many many ways to subscribe to your RSS feed on apps like Twitter, Google Reader and many more. But now, FriendFeed the social aggregator might have just made the subscribers stats a bit closer to the actual values. From now onwards, FriendFeed subscribers counts will be included in the total RSS subscribers count. Now that is good if you also share your RSS content on your FriendFeed account, it makes measuring the RSS subscribers a whole lot easier. And with the widespread use of social networking and social bookmarking, stuffs get shared around so it’s pretty hard to get the actual RSS subscribers count right. But on a side-note, you should start subscribing to our blog by RSS or Twitter if you have not!!

Have you ever bought a book online? Chances are you might have used Google Books before and now Google Books has rolled out a series of updates you just might love. The main new features address some new updates like navigation of contents of the books and sharing of previews of the books. And this pretty much sums up a few things — Google books is turning into a mega online book store as well as some social service. We are anticipating more on such updates coming to other Google products. Here are the main highlights of the new features in Google Books:

1. Embeds and links – This new toolbar option allows you to embed a preview of a full view or partner book in any of your websites or blogs–all with a simple html snippet. It’s a lot like the embed tag that makes it so easy to share YouTube videos. Programmers comfortable with API tools could accomplish this via our Embedded Viewer API, but this new solution is much easier for everyone to use. You can also choose to grab a URL link to email or IM to friends that takes them to the same book and page on Google Books. For readers, this means they can more easily share pages from books you love, while publisher partners can gain even more awareness across the web to promote their books.

2. Better search within each book – You’ve always been able to search inside books you find on Google Book Search. Now, for public domain and partner books, we’ve made it easier to see exactly where your search term appears within the book by showing you more context around the term, including an image from the part of the page on which it appears. You can click on those images to navigate directly to the pages inside the book. You can also sort your search results by relevance in addition to page order in the book or magazine.

In the search results bar, you’ll find ‘Previous’ and ‘Next’ buttons that allow you to browse through search hits quickly and easily.

3. Thumbnail view – Click on the thumbnail view button in the toolbar to see an overview of all the pages in a public domain book or in a magazine. Clicking on a thumbnail image will take you to that page in the reading view (available for “full view” books).

4. Contents drop-down menu – Above the book itself, you’ll find a Contents drop-down that allows you to jump to chapters within the book–or articles within a magazine. (In case you’re wondering, we built this using the same structure extraction technology that supports our mobile version of Google Books.)

5. Plain Text Mode – We’ve made it easier to find our plain text versions of public domain books. If a book is available in full view, you can click the ‘Plain text’ button in the toolbar to see our HTML version of the text (derived via OCR for full view books). This is especially useful for visually impaired Google users, who can use this format for text-to-speech and other types of software.

6. Page Turn Button and Animation – In addition to scrolling through the book, you can now also click the page turn button at the bottom of the screen, even if you haven’t yet finished the page. An animated line moves with the page turn to make it easier to keep track of your location in the text.

7. Improved Book Overview Page – On the Overview page you’ll find an assortment of useful data about the book, including reviews, ratings, summaries, related books, key words and phrases, references from the web, places mentioned in the book, publisher information, etc.