Google described it as an experimental tool enabling the user to find queries with a similar pattern to a target data series.

Users can upload data sets (by state or time series, and Google Correlate will compute the “Pearson Correlation Coefficient” between your time series and the frequency time series for every query in its database.

Previously only available in the U.S., Google announced today that the service is being extended into 49 new countries.

“Since our initial launch, we’ve graduated to Google Trends and we’ve seen a number of great applications of Correlate in several domains, including economics (consumer spending, unemployment rate and housing inventory), sociology and meteorology,” says Google software engineer Matt Mohebbi. “The correspondence of gas prices and search activity for fuel efficient cars was even briefly discussed in a Fox News presidential debate and NPR recently covered correlations related to political commentators.”

“Health has always been an area of particular interest to our team (Matt Mohebbi, Julia Kodysh, Rob Schonberger and Dan Vanderkam),” says Mohebbi. “Correlate was inspired by Google Flu Trends and many of us worked on both systems. So we were very excited when the BioSense division at the CDC published a page which shows correlations between some of their national trends in patient diagnosis activity and Google search activity. With just three years of weekly data, relevant search terms are surfaced. For example, the time series for bloody nose surfaces ‘bloody snot’ and ‘blood in snot’.”

“While these terms shouldn’t come as a surprise, there are others which are more interesting, including searches related to static electricity, dry skin, and red cheeks,” says Mohebbi. “Of course, correlation is not causation but we hope that Correlate can be used as a method for researchers to generate new hypotheses with their data.”

For more on Google Correlate, check out this FAQ page.

Google has put up an official blog post discussing the future of specific products. Some are getting shut down, and others are being integrated into other products. Here’s Google’s plans for each of them:

Aardvark: Aardvark was a start-up we acquired in 2010. An experiment in a new kind of social search, it helped people answer each other’s questions. While Aardvark will be closing, we’ll continue to work on tools that enable people to connect and discover richer knowledge about the world.

Subscribed Links: Subscribed Links enabled developers to create specialized search results that were added to the normal Google search results on relevant queries for subscribed users. Although we’ll be discontinuing Subscribed Links, developers will be able to access and download their data until September 15, at which point subscribed links will no longer appear in people’s search results.

Aardvark has resided in Google Labs since Google made the purchase, and in July, Google announced that it was pulling the plug on Google Labs. Little was revealed about just which projects would live on, but the company said at the time, “In many cases, this will mean ending Labs experiments—in others we’ll incorporate Labs products and technologies into different product areas. And many of the Labs products that are Android apps today will continue to be available on Android Market. We’ll update you on our progress via the Google Labs website.”

Matt McGee looked at the fate of over half of Google’s Labs Projects in a post earlier this week. Google Correlate has been added to Google Trends and Google sets is shutting down by September 5.

Places Directory is also being phased out. Other products like: Google Shopper, Open Spot, Intersection Explorer, Walky Talky, My Tracks for Android, Google Goggles, Sky Map for Android, Gesture Search, Finance for Android and Google Listen remain available through the Android Market.

Here’s a message from the Aardvark team as posted on the Aardvark blog:

As part of the shutdown of GoogleLabs, Aardvark will be shutting down at the end of September.

Aardvark began as a small experiment in a new kind of social search, and over a few years blossomed into a service that made millions of connections between people to answer each other’s questions.  It was a great experience in seeking to combine a broad vision for the future of technology with a rigorous user-centered design process.  Over this time, we learned a lot about creating and maintaining online communities, and how to facilitate sharing of knowledge between people.

We’ve been excited to share these lessons within Google over the past year, especially as part of the effort behindGoogle+.  It has been gratifying to see how well this project is doing — even in these early stages, Google+ has already become a great place to share knowledge online, eclipsing the original vark.com! — and there is much more to come very soon.  In this and other projects at Google, the Aardvark team remains committed to developing powerful tools for connecting people and improving access to information.

Of course, we’re also sad to say goodbye to the original Aardvark here at vark.com.  Who would have thought that a digital version of a nocturnal burrowing mammal would have engendered so much affection!  We’re very grateful to the whole Aardvark community for your support along the way.

Onwards,

Max and Damon

p.s.  In the spirit of data liberation, we want to make sure that any of you Aardvark users who would like to retrieve your past data from the service can do so.  Right now of course you can log in and manually copy anything you’d like to keep.  Or if you prefer, you can email us at support@vark.com and we’ll send you a bulk dump of your data (please allow time for us to process these).  After September 30, there will be no way to retrieve your data, as shortly after that we will delete everything permanently.

If you’re unfamiliar with Google’s Data Liberation Front, it’s essentially an initiative that lets users of Google products export their data.

Last week we explained that we’re prioritizing our product efforts. As part of that process, we’ve decided to wind down Google Labs. While we’ve learned a huge amount by launching very early prototypes in Labs, we believe that greater focus is crucial if we’re to make the most of the extraordinary opportunities ahead.

In many cases, this will mean ending Labs experiments—in others we’ll incorporate Labs products and technologies into different product areas. And many of the Labs products that are Android apps today will continue to be available on Android Market. We’ll update you on our progress via the Google Labs website.

We’ll continue to push speed and innovation—the driving forces behind Google Labs—across all our products, as the early launch of the Google+ field trial last month showed.

The most recent Google Labs project to be released was Swiffy – the SWF to HTML5 file converter. Other projects to come out this year include: Google Scribe, Julia Map, Art Project, Google Correlate, Page Speed Online, and Google Talk Guru.

Other notable experiments to come out over the years include: Fast Flip, Google Goggles, Google Listen, Google News Timeline, Public Data Explorer, Google Squared, Sky Map for Android, Shopper, Google Moderator, Google Code Search, Google Mars, Google Desktop, Google Groups, Google Alerts, iGoogle and Google Suggest.

Even Google Reader, Google Maps, Google Docs, Google Trends, and Google Social Search started out in Labs.

It’s unclear just what projects they’ll be shutting down. We’ve already seen some make their way into other products. Google Squared, for example is already being used to deliver some kinds of related search results in Google Search. I would assume Google will keep us posted as they shut down on plans for individual items.

Google also recently announced it was closing the doors on Google Health and Powermeter.

Google Correlate is an experimental new tool on Google Labs which enables you to find queries with a similar pattern to a target data series. The target can either be a real-world trend that you provide (e.g., a data set of event counts over time) or a query that you enter.

It uses search activity data to find queries with a similar pattern to a target data series – the results of which can be viewed on the Google Correlate site (or downloaded as a CSV file).

“Google Correlate is like Google Trends in reverse,” Google says on an FAQ page. “With Google Trends, you type in a query and get back a data series of activity (over time or in each US state). With Google Correlate, you enter a data series (the target) and get back a list of queries whose data series follows a similar pattern.”

Users can upload their own data sets. When you upload one, (by US State or Time Series), Gogole Correlate will compute the “Pearson Correlation Coefficient” between your time series and the frequency time series for every query in its database.

Google provides a tutorial on how to use it here. There’s also a whitepaper.

Google suggests the time series data can be used to find things like what search terms are more popular in the winter, more likely to be issued in 2005, match the pattern of actual flu activity, etc. The state data can be used for things like what terms correlate with the state’s latitude, the annual rainfall in the state, being in New England, etc.

Interestingly the Labs experiment has its own Labs section, which so far only consists of one thing: search by drawing. It’s pretty cool. You can simply draw a pattern on the graph, and it will give you web search activity that closely matches the pattern you drew. I drew some random pattern, and Google found that it closely resembled US web activity for media player 10 codecs, for example.

Google says the data for Google Correlate is available from January 2003 to the present, with data being updated on a weekly basis.

Application intended for chat (IM) users, including users using chat clients on low-end phones, allowing them to answer simple web queries from the context of their chat application. First invite guru@googlelabs.com to chat, and then send queries via your chat client. Categories supported include weather, translation, unit and currency conversions, and sports scores. Send “help” for more information.

Common thinking is that this is somehow related to Aardvark, the social Q&A service Google acquired last year. We’ve yet to hear from Google about that.

When you sign up for Talk Guru, it becomes part of your Gmail experience within Chat. It doesn’t appear to be incredibly sophisticated, and I have a hard time seeing how this will be any more useful than simply searching at any point in time. Here are some examples of the kinds of things it’s supposed to be able to return.

I didn’t have much luck finding any info about the upcoming Final Four. “Well, it hasn’t happened yet,” I thought. “Surely ‘elite 8′ will yield better results”. Not so much. “Kentucky score?” Nope.

That said, it is just an experimental project in its early stages, and it is intended more for low-end phones.

"We’re making a new data format, the DataSet Publishing Language (DSPL), openly available, and providing an interface for anyone to upload their datasets, so they can benefit from the same powerful, animated visualizations that we provide with our existing datasets, and then share them with other people to explore and understand," the company explains. 

"Over the past two years, we’ve made public data easier to find, explore and understand in several ways, providing unemployment figures, population statistics and world development indicators in search results, and introducing the Public Data Explorer tool," says Omar Benjelloun, Technical Lead of the Google Public Data Team. "Together with our data provider partners, we’ve curated 27 datasets including more than 300 data metrics. You can now use the Public Data Explorer to visualize everything from labor productivity (OECD) to Internet speed (Ookla) to gender balance in parliaments (UNECE) to government debt levels (IMF) to population density by municipality (Statistics Catalonia), with more data being added every week."

There will certainly be a whole lot more added every week now that it’s open to the everyone. 

The dataset upload feature is available as a Google Labs feature.

It’s all part of "organizing the world’s information" right?

Now, Google has utilized the tool to show data from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). With the data, Google can show things like  historical and projected money spent for the federal government – obviously a hot button issues these days. 

"As always, there are a number of caveats to this data, and we encourage folks to follow up with experts to better understand what it truly means," John Lyman of Google’s Public Data Partnerships arm warns. "That said, like all of our public data visualizations, we hope these simple charts will help inform the public debate and illuminate trends and key insights."

"Note the line for ‘interest on national debt,’ which will outpace the Social Security Administration and Department of Defense by 2015," Lyman points out. 

The entire list of datasets the tool is able to access is as follows:

Google uses public stat charts in search results sometimes. "This Labs feature uses the same line chart visualization," the company says on a FAQ page. "We are planning to make more data searchable and will continue to improve the public data search feature."

The company also says that while the data from the tool cannot be downloaded, they’re investigating features to enable users to export the data.

Because of that experimental status, it has some kinks. Right off the bat, you should know that it works best for books, DVDs, landmarks, logos, contact info, artwork, businesses, products, barcodes, and text (it even does translation). 

Google has some picture taking tips for better search results:

• Take photos in areas with good lighting.
• Zoom in as much as possible by placing your phone close to whatever you want to photograph
• Use the crop button to focus on the area you’re interested in
• Use your phone in "left landscape" orientation (with your right thumb pressing the shutter)
• Hold your hands steady, and use the on-screen shutter button

Types of searches you’ll want to avoid using Google Goggles for, at least at this point, include: animals, plants, cars, furniture, and apparel. I’d expect Google to make strides in these areas as time goes on, but for now, don’t expect spectacular results for these types of queries. 

You can share pictures you take with Google Goggles right from Goggles itself, using Bluetooth, Facebook, Gmail, Picasa, etc. 

Goggles SERPs show web results, text matches, similar images, other matches, suggested results and a translation option. "If you take a picture of a business card, you’ll get links to search for the person, email or call them directly, visit their company URL, or add them as a contact on your phone," Google notes. "Barcode matches will provide a link to Google Product Search so you can quickly compare prices."

Using search history, users can view and manage saved copies of pictures they’ve taken with Google Goggles. That’s interesting in itself. You can have up to 1,000 picutres in your Goggles Search History, and you can remove items from it any time. 

One of the most potentially useful features of Goggles, especially if you travel a lot, is the translation feature. It currently reads English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish, and translates to those languages, as well as Afrikaans, Albanian, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Galician, Icelandic, Irish, Norwegian, Portuguese, Swedish. Language support will no doubt increase as time goes on. 

Google does note that it’s not great with pictures of words from computer screens, and that the best results will come from printed materials. 

Have you used Google Goggles? What is your impression? Share your thoughts. 

Breadcrumb enables you to create a variety of mobile learning applications and allows you to make your application work with only three additions to plain text. Infinitely scalable, easy to create, and readable on Internet-enabled smart-phones or computers, Breadcrumb gives you maximum output for the development time.

Google cites the following use cases: 

• Help data-center technicians troubleshoot problems on the datacenter floor.
• Teach novice nurses how to interpret patient symptoms the way expert nurses do.
• Educate new managers about how the decisions they make affect the happiness of their teammates.
• Assist a new learning and development professional who wants to choose a survey tool.
• Engage kids in a choose-your-own-adventure style, text-based learning game.
  

Google hasn’t given many other details about the project yet. It will be interesting to see how it is used. Comments range from excitement to confusion on the experiment’s page.

I find the naming of this project a bit curious, considering Google also often refers to breadcrumbs in the web page navigational sense, as well. 

"In addition to saving keystrokes, Google Scribe’s suggestions indicate correct or popular phrases to use," says Google.

Google Scribe will show suggestions as you type by default, but that can be changed to "on demand" or my selecting an "on tab" option in the toolbar. Functionality can be toggled on and off with a keyboard shortcut. 

Users can choose if they want suggestions to be sorted by alphabetical order, "Google Scribe Score", which is based on popularity, relevance, etc., relevance, or expected typing savings. 

There is a Google Scribe bookmarklet that lets you use the tool on any web page. You can give Google Scribe, enable/disable it, and add the bookmarklet here.

The Google Labs listing indicates that Scribe was last updated last month, and I have seen a couple mentions of it from the past, so it appears that it’s not a completely new product, but this is the first we’ve seen of it, and it doesn’t appear that many others have discussed it either.