Giving chocolate is almost as personal as giving jewelry.  You don’t want to offend anyone by giving or not giving chocolate.  To help ensure that you don’t end up in the dog house, we have developed a list of the top ten things to include in a chocolate gift basket.

10. A card.  Express your love through words and the recipient will hold onto those words long after the chocolate is gone.

9. Wine.  Get an expensive, rich dessert wine and put it in the basket.  After the romantic dinner dessert can be an extension of the romance

One of my favorite Google service – its online translation tool just got a newly streamlined layout. And along with the new site design are some great features that will make it faster and easier to translate words in 51 languages.

In case you’re living under the rock, Google Translate is an online tool that lets you automatically translate text and web pages into various languages. I use this service when covering netbook news in foreign languages including French, Dutch, German, Chinese and Japanese. The translation could be crappy at times but good enough to give you the gist of the foreign news that you are trying to cover.

NASA said yesterday it had discovered water on the moon, and Google — always big on space exploration — wasted no time producing a special logo to celebrate the event.

Google’s backing a contest to put a private rover on the moon. Who knows? Maybe one of those rovers will visit sources of water. And we’ll get a new logo to celebrate that.

An attention Heat mapping is a combination of two elements: eye-gazing, and predicted attention.

Eye-gazing simulates the sequence of extremely rapid and involuntary eye movements (”saccades”) that happen as your eye scans a scene. This is overlaid on a Heat mapping of the attention represented by different colors which predicts where the brain will focus. Hotter areas indicate a more intense focus, while cooler areas show a lower level of awareness and importance.

What factors are considered in generating a predictive Heat mapping?

Street View in Google Maps has completed capturing all 50 U.S. states as it has finally added street view imagery of Oahu and Maui in Hawaii.  Google has worked with the Hawaii Visitors and Conventions Bureau to bring high-resolution images of  Hawaiis best beaches and make it available for everyone to see.

With Hawaii now in Street View on Google Maps, you can now go on a virtual vacation, identify possible destinations that you would want to go to on your next vacation or to simply admire the state.

Google has now added Hawaii to Street View, making it the 50th and final US state to be included in the Maps image database. You can also get these images in Google Maps for Mobile.

Google launched Street View a little more than two years ago, in May 2007. Since that time there has been considerable controversy around privacy questions but one now gets the sense that this has largely died down in most places. From early questions about its utility, Street View has become an important part of the Google Maps offering (and is integrated into the new Android 2.0 Maps Navigation). More recently Google has pushed beyond paved highways and onto trials, college campuses and zoos with its Street View trike.

A Google Docs error message has an interesting suggestion: “If you are running a Google Docs experiment, turn it off.”

Google Docs will probably add a Labs section with experimental features, much like Gmail Labs and Google Calendar Labs.

Here’s what I’d like to see in the list of experiments: document pagination, chat sidebar in all Google Docs services, limited editing mode, integration with Google Scholar, autofilter and better conditional formatting for Google Spreadsheets.

Some of the most popular suggestions for Google Docs: drag and drop image placement, more page formatting options, mobile editing, integration with Gmail and an image editor.

Google received many complaints that Google Toolbar is not available for Chrome, so it created a page meant to convince users that “many Toolbar features are already built right into Google Chrome”.

The page explains that Google Chrome already includes a search box, a pop-up blocker, a new tab page, a spell checker and it offers a list of bookmarklets that let you create bookmarks, translate web pages or view Sidewiki annotations. Some of the explanations are plain wrong:

“Like Toolbar’s ‘AutoFill’ button, Google Chrome shows you text you’ve previously entered on websites, to save you time and typing.”

Billed as the first major redesign in a decade, Microsoft has introduced a dramatic new look and feel for the MSN portal. The redesign simplifies and cleans up most elements on the site. Among other things, it makes video more central, incorporates Facebook and Twitter, creates a dedicated new local area and emphasizes search.

MSN, which Microsoft says now has 600 million users globally (which would make it larger than Yahoo), is a huge asset for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it drives roughly 45% of Bing’s queries. Even a cursory look at the old and new MSN homepages reveals the superiority of the new design:

Google’s Document Viewer lets you preview PDF files, PowerPoint presentations and TIFF files without installing additional software. It’s great for linking to documents available online and for embedding them in a site.

If you want to link to a certain page from your document, adjust the URL. This is the link generated by Google for a PDF file:

http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Finfolab.stanford.edu%2Fpub%2Fpapers%2Fgoogle.pdf

To load a specific page in the document, you need to add a hash to the end of the URL. Page IDs are numbered sequentially like this: :0.page.0, :0.page.2, :0.page.3…

So to load page #15 of the document, use this link:

Today is Halloween and the search engines have logos up for the special day. Before I post the logos, here are some posts from others in the community on Halloween.

Matt Cutts of Google had a holy costume. Google Blogoscoped noticed Google added trick or treat to their robots.txt file. Bing has a special visual search edition for today. Bruce Clay’s team dressed up and PPC Heros added some funk. Finally, the logos you see below is reposted from the Search Engine Roundtable.

Google has four Doodles:

Yahoo (Flash):

AOL (Flash):

YouTube:

Earlier this week, Google updated the look of its mapping service and now MapQuest has done the same. The goal is to improve readability and give more accurate details such has a building’s proportional footprint compared to the streets around it.

Additionally, MapQuest says they’ve added new imagery for terrain and vegetation for Levels 4-9. Here’s before and after screenshots of Philadelphia, per the official MapQuest blog:

Credits to: Search Engine Watch

Six months ago, Google released an image search labs project that allowed you to search by similarity within image search. Google announced that they have promoted that labs project as a default feature in Google Image Search.

Now when you search on Google Images, you may often find a link under the image that says, “Find similar images.” When you click that link, Google will show you images that look similar to the image you were looking at.

Here is a picture of how that link looks:

Google Calendar implemented a basic snooze feature for pop-up notifications. You can click on “remind me again in 5 minutes” in Google Calendar’s web interface.

“When alerted to an event via a pop-up notification and dismissing it, the calendar interface will show you an option to remind you again shortly. Click on that link if you want to be reminded of the event again,” explains Google.

Another implementation is available in Google Talk Labs Edition, a Windows client for Google Talk that shows Google Calendar notifications.

Credits to: Google Operating System

If Google Maps doesn’t offer high-quality maps for your country, you can improve them using Google Map Maker. “Google Map Maker allows you to create a map by adding or editing features such as roads, businesses, parks, schools and more. Using Google Map Maker tools, you can visually mark locations and add detailed information about them. Once you have submitted content, this information may be edited by other users or moderators. Your mapping contributions on Map Maker are eventually also made available on Google Maps,” explains Google.

Michael Lopez, Web Design Lead at Google, answered a few questions about Google’s doodles. He says that it usually takes 1-2 days to design a doodle and that Google’s homepage is “the biggest little canvas an artist can display their artwork on”.

The doodle selection process aims to celebrate interesting events and anniversaries around the world that reflect Google’s personality and love of innovation. We know that our list of doodles is not exhaustive, but we try to select doodles that show creativity and innovation in a fun, quirky way. Generally, we choose doodles from a variety of categories, such as those that celebrate holidays, anniversaries, and the lives of artists and inventors.

Gmail Labs has a new experiment that lets you preview documents, spreadsheets and presentations created using Google Docs. If you receive a message that links to a Google Docs file, you’ll be able to preview the document inside Gmail.

“Opening these links in another tab or window is kind of annoying, plus it can be tough to keep the context of the email in mind while viewing the document,” mentions the Gmail Blog. Previews are displayed at the bottom of the message, so I don’t think you can maintain the context.

Google Docs Viewer is a handy way to view PDF, PPT and TIFF files online, without having to install plug-ins or additional applications. Unfortunately, Google didn’t make it easy to use the viewer without having to manually generate URLs.

A Greasemonkey script automates the process by replacing all the links to PDF, PPT and TIFF files from a page with links to Google’s document viewer. To use the script, you need to install Greasemonkey in Firefox or use a dev build of Google Chrome. It should also work in Opera, Safari + GreaseKit and Internet Explorer + IE7Pro.