Facebook Tweaks Search Suggestions For Relevancy

Facebook's search suggestions are about to get significantly better.  Rather than just suggest the names of people, events, groups, and Pages a person's already connected with, suggestions are going to draw from users' networks of friends and the entire site.

It is, of course, nice not to have to type out your closest pal's 17-letter last name multiple times a day.  But this change overcomes a significant flaw in Facebook's existing approach to making suggestions, considering that it's the things people aren't familiar with they probably need the most help spelling and/or tracking down.

As for how the upgraded system will work, Wayne Kao, a Facebook engineer, explained on the company blog, "[I]f you start typing in 'MGM' to find the Facebook Page for the band MGMT, you may see it as the first result in the drop-down menu because you or one of your friends is a fan of MGMT on Facebook."

Or, "If you are searching for something else, like the MGM Grand Las Vegas hotel or the movie studio MGM, you can select one of those instead from the drop-down menu."

Look for this change to roll out over the course of the week.  Then enjoy spending less time typing all sorts of stuff, and not just your best friend's name.

YouTube Expands Auto-Captioning Program

Whether they're used for the benefit of the hard of hearing, people who speak a different language, or just folks who want to watch videos while at work or in a library, captions can be helpful in all sorts of circumstances.  And now, captions should become much more common, as all YouTube users will be able to take advantage of an auto-caption tool.

This tool is designed to work on all English-language clips that have relatively decent audio.  A "request processing" button will be available for content creators who want to minimize a processing delay, and after the English caption has been created, they'll have the option to translate it into any of about 50 languages.

Interesting, right?  Popular, too, if YouTube's predictions prove correct (see the graph below).

The one slight catch (aside from the English-only and audio quality restrictions touched on earlier) relates to accuracy; YouTube's making no guarantees that its captions will be perfect.  But content creators will have the option of editing the captions, so this is hardly a dealbreaker.

A YouTube representative assured WebProNews in an email, "This is an exciting moment for us and represents a culmination of 3 years of work at Google and YouTube.  Auto-Captions for everyone represents one of the largest projects of its kind and will open up millions of YouTube videos to deaf and hard-of-hearing."

Google Shopper Android App Launches

Android phone owners should now be able to become smarter consumers.  A free app called Google Shopper has been released, and with it, users are supposed to find it easier than ever to look up product specs, check out reviews, and compare prices.

Google Shopper doesn't quite represent some breakthrough.  Instead, it combines the image recognition abilities offered by Google Goggles with the barcode-scanning feature Google Product Search for mobile introduced in May.  Plus some voice recognition tech that's been in development for even longer.

The Google Mobile Blog explains that, as a result, "Shopper lets you find product information quickly by using your phone's camera.  It can recognize cover art of books, CDs, DVDs, and video games, along with most barcodes.  You can also speak the name of the product you're looking for."

Then additional features include the ability to star items for return visits and share things with friends.

This is bound to come in handy in all sorts of situations.  Even more so, perhaps, since Google Shopper is free and seems to work rather well.  The only party that might suffer due to this development will be the retailer(s) whose customers discover they should do a lot more shopping at Amazon and Newegg.

 

Versatile Bug Labs Embraces Android

It's been no secret that the Android operating system will wind up on all sorts of devices; last year, for example, we talked about home phones and set-top boxes that were in development.  Now, however, it may almost literally wind up on "all sorts of devices," as the BUG 2.0 platform has introduced support for Android.

Bug Labs is an interesting little company specializing in modular, open source gear.  The pieces - which may be cameras, LCDs, GPS units, accelerometers, or lots of other things - can then be snapped together to form custom gadgets.  And programming the gadgets is supposed to be painless.  So it's rather exciting to see Bug Labs and Google linked.

Bug Labs said in a statement, "This is a leap forward for both Bug Labs and Android, as it brings a wide developer community into the open hardware movement.  Current Android applications can be ported directly to the BUG hardware, giving developers a new platform to expand on these apps and add significant functionality through open hardware."

The statement then continued, "Further, Android developers can now build devices that span far beyond typical consumer-focused needs, such as in the healthcare, M2M and telematics industries."

Unfortunately, Bug Labs and Google haven't seen fit to talk about prices and release dates, so it remains unknown when the BUG 2.0 platform will hit the market, and how accessible it will be to the average developer or tinkerer at that time.

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