Current Projects: New ways to search within a book

Originally posted at http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2009/07/new-ways-to-search-within-book.html

At Google we want to make it easy for you to find the information you need. As such, we've made searching for passages within a book part of the core experience of Google Books.

Earlier this month we revamped the search experience to make searching inside a book easier. You can now view the context of a search result, sort results by relevancy or page order, and flip through results quickly while viewing the book.

Today I'm excited to announce one more addition to the experience of searching a book: search results in your scrollbar. Now when you search in a book, little hints will appear in the margin to indicate where you results are located. When you hover over one of these annotations, you'll get a quick preview of the search results and the option of jumping directly to the associated page. Here I searched Aunt Mary's New England Cook Book for pie recipes:

Previously, it was difficult to get a feel for where results were located in a book. You could count the page numbers and make a guess, but that's hardly efficient. Now there is a strong visual display of result locations, and often clusters will form around particular chapters or passages. This will help you navigate more easily between pages which contain your search term.

These annotations will both make navigation between results quicker and help users jump to the correct result.

As always, feel free to provide feedback. Happy searching!

Habits, routines, and posting

Those of you who read my blog will notice I promised all sorts of content a while back, but never delivered anything asides from some Pidgin announcements.

I have no shortage of things to write about, but just never found the time to write them. I could never make time for a post out of my busy schedule.

Starting today, that changes. I've realized that it's near impossible to make time for things that are mundane and low priority. Instead, you need to make habits out of them.

Take going to the gym for example. Ever have trouble motivating yourself to make time for a workout? I sure did. That changed the moment made it a routine. Every other day, I commit myself to exercising no matter what. If I'm busy, I cut my workout short, sometimes to a mere 20 minutes.

The important part is that it is now 100% normal for me to show up at the gym on a regular basis. Instead of planning other activities first and then wondering how I'll get to the gym, I expect to be at the gym a given time. All my other plans have to defer to the gym to some degree.

I've been successful with my gym habit, so let's see if I can apply the same lesson to blogging. Don't touch that dial!

Pidgin 2.5.8 released

As many of you may have noticed, Yahoo stopped working for all users not long ago. We quickly pushed out 2.5.7 but several issues remained (such as crashes, phantom buddies, and being unable to compile).

2.5.8 is now released, which should resolve (we hope!) the remaining problems.

You can download 2.5.8 at www.pidgin.im

Voice! Video!

Yes, that's right ladies and gentlemen.

PIDGIN NOW HAS VOICE AND VIDEO CHAT SUPPORT!

I doubt much explanation is needed here. Video and voice chat has probably been the most requested Pidgin feature over the past five years.

Many thanks to Maiku, our Summer of Code student from 2008 who tirelessly spent many hours implementing this. This was a huge undertaking. Maiku has told me he will accept compensation in the form of pizzas.

We expect this functionality will be released sometime this month. Stay tuned.

Watch a demo of video chat

Pidgin 2.5.5 released, fixes minor headaches

A number of minor problems have been fixed in this new release. If you've been having problems, upgrade and hopefully they will be gone.

The download and list of changes can be found at www.pidgin.im

Encryption and OTR in Pidgin

According to last month's user survey, "encrypted messages" was one of the most popular feature requests- 55% of users say it's important to them. That's huge.

To put this in perspective, only video chat is more popular at 57%.

Pidgin already has plugin support for encrypted messages. However, it helps if all your buddies have it installed too.

Thus, I asked the developers what they thought of installing encryption by default. Here's what we agreed on:

• OTR (Off The Record): OTR is the most secure encryption protocol available for Pidgin, and is already a default for Adium users. While promising, it has some usability bugs that need work. Ian Goldberg, the professor who created OTR, told me he would love to have people contribute patches.
  
  
• Pidgin Encryption: Pidgin Encryption has no private method of key exchange and verification, which can create a false sense of security.
  
  
• Pidgin Paranoia: Pidgin Paranoia uses a form of encryption that is strong on paper, but in practice is vulnerable to attacks.
  
  
• XMPP/PGP: XMPP/PGP isn't as secure as OTR, but is a published protocol standard. The developers will welcome a well written patch for this.

Long story short, we won't be including encryption in Pidgin despite how popular it is. Sorry. This may be reconsidered when improvements have been to the plugins.

I hope this gives some good insight into decisions that are being made. Feel free to ask if you want more clarification on what I wrote here.

Pidgin 2.5.4 (No more freezing on exit)

Pidgin 2.5.4 has been released, which contains a number of fixes.

If Pidgin froze or hung when you tried to close it, this release will take care of that.

Also, the MSN connection problems have been resolved by Microsoft.