I asked Google how much traffic the chrome tulips drove to iGoogle, but a company spokesperson declined to comment, saying only that Google had received “positive feedback” from users. She said that iGoogle currently accounts for 20 percent of visits to Google’s home page — a proportion, I bet, that Google would love to reverse. The spokesperson also declined to address any link between iGoogle and OpenSocial, noting only that “we recently launched an iGoogle sandbox to developers, which gives developers the ability to build more interactive gadgets that can incorporate OpenSocial.” Indeed, you can find more than 75,000 “gadgets” to hang on your iGoogle page these days. (Click on the tab next to Themes.)

I personally like the plain old Google page compared to the Yahooesque version of iGoogle. I know there are a lot of handy things you can do with the feature of iGoogle but when I want to search for something, which happens to be part of my profession, I don’t need the distraction that those features provide.

Anyways, there’s one cool feature that Google Docs has that I’m pretty sure I’ve never come across in any version of Microsoft Word. When you’re typing up your document in Google Docs, you can click on “Tools” on the menu bar, and then select “Word Count”. I like to check on my word counts just for the sake of knowing. But when you click on “Word Count”, you don’t just get a simple word count. Instead, you get a whole host of cool information, including: word count, character count (with spaces), character count (without spaces), the number of paragraphs, the number sentences, and the number of pages. You’re also shown some cool statistics such as the average number of sentences per paragraph, average number of words per sentence, the average number of characters per word, and the average number of words per page.

That, however, is not the coolest thing the “Word Count” feature shows. What I found the most fascinating is the Flesch Reading Ease score, the Flesch-Kinkaid Grade Level, and the Automated Readability Index.

The Flesch Reading Ease score indicates material that is easier to read. Lower number scores mark harder to read passages, and high scores mark passages that are easier to read. A score of 90-100 is easily understood by the average 11-year-old, a score of 60-70 is easily understood by 13 to 15-year-olds, and those passages with a score of 0 to 30 are best understood by college graduates. Examples of scores include: Reader’s Digest - 65, Time magazine - 52, and Harvard Law Review - low 30’s.

The score is based on the following formula.

The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level formula takes the Flesch Reading Ease score, which falls on a scale of 0 to 100, and translates that into a U.S. grade level. This makes it easier for teachers, parents, librarians, and so on to judge the readability level of books and text. It may also mean the number of years of education required to understand the text fully, which is typically more relevant when the number is greater than 12. The following formula is used to determine the grade level:

A score of 9.3, for example, would indicate that the passage is expected to be understood by an average student in 9th grade. The lowest possible theoretical score is a -3.4, but even simple texts like Dr. Seuss’ “Green Eggs and Ham” scores a -1.3 due to its prevalence of monosyllabic words, and average of about 5.7 words per sentence.

The last readability score that Google Docs gives you is the Automated Readability Index. Like the Flesch-Kinkaid Grade level score, this assigns a U.S. grade level to the text or passage. Unlike the Flesh-Kinkaid Grade Level score, the ARI relies on the factor of characters per word, instead of syllables per word. It uses the following formula to determine the score/grade level:

Whether it’s accurate or not, is up to you to decide, but I personally found it pretty interesting.

According to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Google’s top priority this year is to make money off YouTube, the video-sharing site they acquired in 2006. In an interview which aired on CNBC Wednesday, Schmidt talked about Google’s plans for YouTube and sent shares of the company up 4.7%.

Schmidt revealed that Google hadn’t yet figured out “the perfect solution of how to make money”, but insists that they’re “working on that.” He also revealed that YouTube planned to roll out a series of new products this year aimed at generating advertising. Speaking of these products, he said that “they’re not announced” and that these ads would be “much more participative, much more creative” and “much more interesting in and of themselves.”

The new ad services that Google is planning to offer will go beyond their basic in-line advertising, said Schmidt. In-line advertising already runs on YouTube, and run along the bottom of YouTube videos.

In the interview, Schmidt also left open the possibility of working with Yahoo more, indicating that Google is still in the running for a business deal which would see Yahoo replace some of the ads running along side its search results with Google-delivered ads.

The Register Writes about the update in image searching

Last week, at the International World Wide Web Conference in Beijing, two Google-affiliated researchers presented a paper called “PageRank for Product Image Search,” trumpeting a fledging algorithm that overhauls the primitive text-based methods used by the company’s current image search technologies.

“Our experiment results show significant improvement, in terms of user satisfaction and relevancy, in comparison to the most recent Google Image Search results,” Shumeet Baluja and Yushi Jing tell the world from the pages of their research paper, available here.

Looks like Google has found yet another way to make our jobs as information professionals easier.

Libraries are turning to blogging more and more, as the medium of connecting with users becomes mainstream. What is one of the benefits of blogging for your library? Your presence in Google, and other search engines. The more content that you write the more likely a patron will be able to find you in Google. Whether its hawking library services or programming, or giving tutorials that will help users, the more you update your blog the better the chance you will reach an audience. And when you get a new person to your site, it will be easier to convert them to a patron. So if your library doesn’t blog yet, what are you waiting for?

The Associated Press took a glimpse into the process behind Google’s digital book project. The article states that 28 libraries are now working with Google scanning rare books that will be searchable through books.google.com. Google’s much heralded partnership with the University of Michigan has yielded 1 Million total books that have been put in the database with 5 Million more to go. Preservation Librarians will find the article interesting as it gives you a glimpse of how workers take great care in keeping the books safe during the process with special temperatures (brrr) so the books are not damages. Do yourself a favor and read the informative article by clicking the link above.

Perhaps Google wants people to have enough money to buy their burritos, and then get so fat that they will have to join a gym in order to get back in shape. In all seriousness though some of the names on the list are very interesting and give you a glimpse into what may be the next service, including googleauction.com and googlebroadband.com, that the Internet giant may have up their sleeve.

While your city may not be represented (like Cleveland who boasts that they have the number #1 transit system in the country), it’s probably a good idea as an information specialist to verse yourself in Google Transit. You know that one day your Transit Authority will be added to Google’s listing and you will want to know how to answer the question that you have been asked countless times ie “Do you have the bus route for (insert your local route here)”.