I can read English. If you’re reading this blog post, you probably can too. But if you’re like me—someone who is not one of the 300 or 400 million native English speakers in a world of more than 6 billion people—you might be more comfortable on using your own language for personal activities. I know I am, and I can still remember the days 16 years ago when my dad and I were tweaking the home PC-XT to make a database application work in Chinese instead of in English. Now being a software engineer myself working in this great company whose products are used by people around the world, I would almost feel guilty if my product doesn’t speak in the same language as you do.

Fortunately, my feeling of guilt is coming to an end. When we released the Google Notebook in its shiny, fresh new look, we also made it speak 17 other languages besides English. We have German, Polish, Turkish—to name a few—and of course Chinese. Admittedly, there is still a long way to go for us to reach everyone in the world in all the thousands of languages. Rest assured, though, that just because your language isn’t one of the first doesn’t mean that we have forgotten you.

In case you haven’t heard about it before, Google Notebook lets you conveniently collect, organize and share information while searching and browsing the web. If you’ve tried it already, I urge you to try again, as its new interface is much smoother to use than it was—and I’m not saying that just because I’m looking at it in Chinese.

Original Post

Asteroids, Space Invaders, Centipede and Tetris—remember when you could only play these games at an arcade? I would line up behind at least 6 people for my chance at Asteroids.

Time warp—now it’s 2007. Games can be played anywhere and at anytime. In this mobile world, games have evolved to become a part of our lives. Unlike television, gamers can make games their own—customizing their experience in new ways—and we are helping them do that big time.

But of course developing these sophisticated games can be very expensive. Back in the 80s the cost of producing a single game was about $100K. Today it can cost $25M to produce a game. The good news is there are some very passionate gamers out there that have come up with some interesting new ways to introduce non-intrusive and targeted advertising in order to make gaming accessible and affordable for all.

Our charge at Adscape has always been to honor the game that was developed and find new ways to enable that game to continue so others can enjoy it. That’s why we are so stoked to join Google—because these guys get it, and are committed to helping us continue our mission.

originally posted by Bernie Stolar, Dean of Games

IBM and Yahoo have teamed up to bring geeks and conspiracy buffs around the world UFO Crawler, which is a micro-level search engine designed to bring up only information related to UFOs, ghosts, the unexplained, and creepy things that go bump in the night.

Vid Look Up is a custom search engine via Google that will find the hosted video you are looking for. Whether it is on YouTube, Google Video, MetaCafe, or dozens of other free video sharing sites, this bugger will find it for you.

If you are planning on taking a trip to Europe, hostels can offer an affordable place to stay. This new search engine cuts right to the chase, and will help you find the best rates and comparisons.

We think automatic translation is really cool, and we’re excited to provide useful translations so you can surf web pages in unfamiliar languages. Still, translation is a very hard problem, and we know that when you use translate.google.com to read web pages in other languages, you sometimes encounter translations that we get wrong.

We have a system that can learn to translate better if we know where the problems are. In the past, there was no way to tell us about problem translations. Now there is. Next time you see a sentence that makes you go “hmmm,” just hover over it to display the original text tooltip and click the “Suggest a better translation” link. Tell us what it should have said, and we’ll use your suggestion to improve translation quality in future updates to our service.

This feature is available when you use one of the language translation pairs developed by our research group:

English to/from Arabic
English to/from Chinese (Simplified/Traditional)
English to/from Russian
Chinese (Simplified) to/from Chinese (Traditional)
So the next time you can think of a better translation, be sure to use this new interface and share your wisdom! That way, everyone will benefit from it.