Congrats to the team behind "Places Mentioned in this Book"

One of the great things about working at Google is the interesting kinds of data we have available, and the sheer quantity of it. It enables a lot of cutting-edge experiments, especially when you take the cross product of different areas of expertise. For example, Google has developed a lot of good technology for recognizing mentions of place names in text, as you might expect would be necessary for Local Search. Additionally, we've scanned and OCR'd a lot of books, as you might expect would be necessary for Book Search.

Today, a few friends of mine launched an exciting new feature of Book Search that exposes the result of applying our location-identification technology to the corpus of books. For a lot of books, the "about this book" page now includes a Google Map annotated with places mentioned in the book, where each annotation actually gives you the snippet of text that mentions that place. I've had a lot of fun exploring the results on some of my favorite books.

This is one of those interesting software products you really can only build at few companies, and I'm proud that Google is one of them.

Check out the new stuff over on the right-hand side

I'm playing some with Google Reader's sharing feature, and one of the cool things it gives you is a widget for clippings of shared items, which I have now added to this blog over there on the right-hand side.

Of course, since no one reads this blog on blogspot.com, you can also try the feed.

Do you have a feed of shared items in Reader? Let me know, I'm interested to learn more about this.

Yahoo Finance is still a better product

Obviously, as a Googler, I want all Google products to so drastically outshine the competition that people around the world just send us checks out of a sheer sense of gratitude. If I had to pick one product that I'd like to see succeed like this, I'd choose Google Finance -- no one has really been innovating in the world of basic consumer-targeted financial web sites for a long time, and the Google Finance team is trying a lot of things to change the game.

But the product still misses some of the basics.

Case in point: Yesterday afternoon, I checked the Google stock price via the [goog]
query from the Google Toolbar.



Hey, we're up seven bucks, that's great! But that weird cliff in the middle of the day is odd. My gut instinct was that something market-wide had happened, so I went to the Google Finance home page to check for interesting headlines.



Nope, nothing interesting there that looks as though it should be bringing down GOOG, but the broad market summary on the left shows the same curve that GOOG had for the course of the day, so it does seem like *something* happened. Let's see what they have to say over at Yahoo Finance:



Boom! Right there -- "Stocks Turn Mixed After Fed Minutes".

The Google Finance team is innovating in a lot of great ways, and they're getting a lot of things right, but Yahoo Finance is still getting the most important things right.