GOOGLE SYSTEM: 2011

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Chrome Shifts Into a New Gear

Chrome 12 is now available in the stable channel and all the Chrome users can try the new features.

1. App search in the address bar.

2. Clear Flash cookies (or Local Shared Objects) using the "Clear browsing data" dialog, instead of visiting a webpage.

3. Chrome Sync no longer uses a modal dialog and it's now properly integrated with the tabbed settings page.

4. Safe Browsing borrowed a feature from Internet Explorer 8: checking downloaded files for malware. Right now, this feature only works for Windows executables and shows a small message in the download bar.

5. No more Gears in Google Chrome. You'll no longer be able to use any app that relies on Gears to provide features like offline storage or web workers. The only Google service that still used Gears was Gmail.

6. Hardware accelerated 3D CSS (or 3D transforms). Chrome's blog suggests to try "Shaun the Sheep", an experiment that uses WebM video and 3D CSS to create an immersive app.

7. Chrome for Mac asks for confirmation when using Cmd+Q to quit the application. "When you press Cmd+Q, it brings up the floaty panel telling you to hold the key combo. When you do, it quits after 1.5 seconds." That sounds annoying.

8. Print and Save buttons in the PDF viewer.

9. A better interface for adding start pages.

Checkboxes are Back in Google Docs

Google Docs tried to get rid of checkboxes in the new UI, but users complained and the feature is now back by popular demand.

"This is actually a hybrid of checkboxes and the more recent selection model. So you can use checkboxes, but you can also still use Ctrl or Cmd to select multiple items. Another one I like a lot, is to use Shift to select many consecutive items at once (click on the checkbox of the first file, scroll down and hold down Shift when you click on a checkbox further down the list, this will select everything in between)."

Checkboxes may seem unnecessary, especially considering that people rarely select multiple files, but they're a familiar interface element that's easy to use. Not many people know that holding down Ctrl lets you select multiple files, even though it's a standard feature in most operating systems.

{ Thanks, Cougar. }

Better Embedding Code for Google +1 Buttons

Google wants to see a +1 button on each Web page, but many people hate embedding widgets and buttons because they clutter pages and add hundreds of milliseconds to the page loading time.

Google is obsessed with speed and performance, but it didn't do a good job at optimizing the code for embedding +1 buttons. As Aaron Peters explains, Google's code blocks page loading if you place it inside the <head> tag, so it's better to place it before you close the <body> tag. An even better idea is to load the Google +1 script in a non-blocking way, just like Google did with Google Analytics, AdSense and Google Related Links.

Aaron also noticed that the JavaScript code is not minified, browsers can only cache the JavaScript file for 6 minutes and there's a mistake in the code from this page: "http" should be replaced with "https" to avoid an unnecessary redirect.

Here's a better embedding code suggested by Aaron:


<!-- Place this tag just before your close body tag -->
<script>
(function(d, t) {
var g = d.createElement(t),
 s = d.getElementsByTagName(t)[0];
g.async = true;
g.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js';
s.parentNode.insertBefore(g, s);
})(document, 'script');
</script>

<!-- Place this tag where you want the +1 button to render -->
<g:plusone></g:plusone>

Apparently, the code doesn't work in Blogger by default. There's a workaround, but you shouldn't use it if you aren't familiar with HTML and editing Blogger's template. Basically you can replace <b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/> with the code generated by Blogger ("view source" is your friend), then delete: <meta content='blogger' name='generator'/>.

As Google explains, "most browsers will load the code in parallel with other scripts on the page, thus reducing the web page load time".

Google Discontinues Its First Specialized Search Engines

They're no longer popular, but they're the first specialized search engines offered by Google, long before Image Search, Google News or Blog Search. Some people might remember Google Linux, Google BSD, Google Mac, Google Microsoft, the search engines that offered results related to operating systems. Google also created custom search engines for universities and a special search engine for the US Government. All of these search engines are now gone. A Google employee confirmed the news:

We are no longer offering specialized search services at google.com/linux, google.com/microsoft, google.com/bsd, google.com/mac, google.com/about and google.com/unclesam. These services were established many years ago to offer search across a limited index of the web, which in the past was a better way to find this information. For example, google.com/linux was designed to help people find information from message boards and blogs about the Linux operating system. Today, search quality has advanced tremendously, and based on our analysis we’ve found that in most cases you're better off looking for this kind of specialized information using the regular Google search box, for example by typing [linux fedora upgrade]. We understand that some users were surprised by this change, so we apologize for not communicating more clearly in advance of redirecting these services to google.com. For more advanced search tips to restrict your search to particular sites and kinds of information, we recommend taking a look at our Help Center.

You can still find Google Linux, Google BSD, Google Microsoft and Google Mac in the Web Archive. Here's a Google Advanced Search page from 2000 that linked to the "topic-specific" search engines and a newsletter from Larry and Sergey that announced Google Government Search in June 1999:

This month you probably noticed that we had our "Uncle Sam" search off of our home page (It's the next best thing to the CIA) that is now housed on the "more Google" page under the title of "special searches." This search covers all the .mil and .gov domains. So if you are looking for something published by the government, this is the best place to start.

Back in 1998, Google's first homepage linked to Stanford Search and Linux Search.

Google has recently updated many of its corporate pages: from the About Google page to the list of products and the Web Search support site.

{ Thanks, Herin. }

Sunday, June 5, 2011

Google's IPv6 Test

As promised in January, Google will test IPv6 on June 8. IPv6 is the new version of the Internet Protocol which allows a lot more devices to connect to the Internet.

"Google has been supporting IPv6 since early 2008, when we first began offering search over IPv6. Since then we've brought IPv6 support to YouTube and have been helping ISPs enable Google over IPv6 by default for their users. On World IPv6 Day, we'll be taking the next big step. Together with major web companies such as Facebook and Yahoo!, we will enable IPv6 on our main websites for 24 hours. This is a crucial phase in the transition, because while IPv6 is widely deployed in many networks, it's never been used at such a large scale before."

Google expects that less than 0.5% of the users will be affected by the test. There's even a page that tests your connection and detects IPv6 connectivity issues. Even if IPv6 will be enabled for 24 hours, IPv4 will continue to be available.

{ via Blogoscoped Forum }

YouTube's Pages for Blogs

Philippe Lagane spotted a new YouTube feature: a special page that lists the most recent videos embedded by a blog. The page includes short snippets from the blog posts and allows you to play all the videos and add them to a playlist.

A Google search for [site:youtube.com/social/blog] returns about 40 results, but it's likely that all the blogs indexed by Google will be included. The new pages could become an alternative to channels for blogs that embed content from other publishers.

YouTube already has a section titled "popular around the Web" that includes the most viewed videos embedded on other websites and shows messages like "As seen on: engadget.com" next to the videos.

{ Thanks, Philippe. }

Saturday, June 4, 2011

More Pictures in Google Search

When you type a query that's popular in Google Image Search, Google's Web search engine shows a list of the most relevant images in an OneBox result. If you add "pictures", "images" to your query, the OneBox now includes a lot more images.

"If we detect that your query has 'high image intent' (meaning, we're pretty sure you're looking for images) we'll start showing more images on the page. If you add words like 'photos', 'pictures', and 'images' to a query, that means you're probably not looking for a blog post or video. Showing more images on the main search results page makes it just that much faster to find the image you're looking for," informs Google.

Another change is that Google will show a larger thumbnail when you mouse an image from the OneBox, just like in Google Image Search. The OneBox result now looks like the first page of images search results, but it's interesting to notice that the ranking is slightly different.

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Creative Commons Videos on YouTube

YouTube added a new feature that lets you change the standard video licensing and switch to the Creative Commons Attribution license, which allows other people to reuse your videos. "Others may copy, distribute and create derivative works from your video — but only if they give you credit."

The new feature is used in YouTube's video editor, which lets you search for Creative Commons videos and use them to create a new video. YouTube says that there are already more than 10,000 videos from organizations like C-SPAN and Al Jazeera, but that's just the beginning.

YouTube will certainly become the largest library of Creative Commons videos, but it's strange to see that it took so long to add a license that encourages creativity. The first Google service that integrated with Creative Commons was Google Web Search (2005) and it was followed by Picasa Web Albums (2008) and Google Image Search (2009).

If you want to find Creative Commons videos on YouTube, click "Filter & Explore" after performing a search and select "Creative Commons". You could also add ", creativecommons" to your query and search for [paris, creativecommons].

YouTube Reactions

YouTube tests a new feature that allows users to express their reactions without posting silly comments. They can just click one of the six buttons (LOL, OMG, EPIC, CUTE, WTF, FAIL) and instantly tag the video.

YouTube already highlights tags that use Internet slag words ("#LOL", "#FAIL", "#CUTE") from the comments and places links to a list of comment search results.

Blogger has a similar feature, but blog authors can edit the list of reactions. "With Reactions, readers can easily respond with one click, increasing feedback on posts."

{ Thanks, Ron. }

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Superstars and Nested Labels, Now Standard Gmail Features

Gmail's blog announced that three experimental features have graduated from Gmail Labs: superstars, nested labels and advanced IMAP controls. There's also a Gmail Labs feature that will no longer be available: the Google Search box.

Superstars extend Gmail's starring feature by adding different types of stars for flagging messages. For example, you could use the red exclamation mark to flag very important messages and the orange quotes to highlight the messages that need a reply. The feature is not obtrusive since you can trigger it by repeatedly clicking a Gmail star. You can go to Gmail's settings page to customize the list of stars.

Nested labels have improved a lot since Google added this feature to Gmail Labs. You can add sub-labels from the menu, quickly rename or delete sub-labels, pick a sub-label from a hierarchical list when you create a filter. Nested labels are still a hack and there are many issues that need to be addressed so that users no longer notice the implementation details. For example, messages that use nested labels don't inherit the parent label.

Advanced IMAP controls are only useful if you want to customize Gmail's IMAP features when using mail clients like Outlook or Thunderbird. You can disable auto-expunge and ask Gmail to wait until the client updates the server, delete messages instead of archiving them when you mark a message as deleted and limit the number of messages from a folder.

{ Thanks, Arend and Robert Karz. }

Google +1 Button for Websites

When Google launched the +1 button for search results back in March, many people wondered why the button couldn't be added to any site. Now you can add the button to your site using a simple JavaScript code, just like the buttons for Twitter and Facebook.

"+1 is as simple on the rest of the web as it is on Google search. With a single click you can recommend that raincoat, news article or favorite sci-fi movie to friends, contacts and the rest of the world. The next time your connections search, they could see your +1's directly in their search results, helping them find your recommendations when they're most useful," explains Google.

The button can be customized: you can hide the number of +1's, choose a different button size or explicitly load the button. "By placing the tag at the bottom of the document, just before the body close tag, you may improve the loading speed of the page," suggests Google.

Right now, very few websites include Google's +1 button, so installing a browser extension could be a better option. Unfortunately, Google hasn't released yet a +1 extension.

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Google Tests a New Mobile Navigation Bar

Some Google users spotted an experimental interface for Google's mobile search site. The horizontal navigation bar now includes icons, just like the vertical desktop bar. While the new interface is less streamlined, it looks more like a Web app and it makes it easier to select a different search service or a Google app.

{ Thanks, Andrew and David. }

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

No More Offline Gmail in Google Chrome

Chrome 12, the upcoming version of Google's browser which is likely to be released today, removes a useful feature: the built-in Gears plugin. While most Google services dropped support for Gears and removed offline access, Gears is still being used in Gmail. Google no longer maintains Gears, which is now legacy software, and focuses on implementing offline support using HTML5.

But why remove Gears support without implementing the features using HTML5 first? Google says that you'll only need to wait for a few weeks or you can still older versions of Firefox, Internet Explorer and mail client such as Thunderbird or Outlook.

"The new Gmail Offline capability is targeted for delivery as a Chrome browser web app this summer. As we move the Gmail Offline capability to a Chrome web app, we will deprecate the Google Gears-based Gmail Offline. This coincides with the version 12 release of the Google Chrome browser which no longer supports Gears. As a result, Google Gears-based Gmail Offline will no longer work with the Chrome browser as of Tuesday May 24, 2011. Google Gears-based Gmail Offline will continue to work in Internet Explorer 8 and Mozilla Firefox 3.6," explains Google.

It's not the best thing to do after convincing users to switch to Chrome and use Web apps, but it's just a temporary issue. If the HTML5 offline Gmail wasn't ready to be released, removing Gears from Chrome could have been delayed.

{ via François }

Google Tests Extended Flight OneBox

Google started to test a more advanced OneBox for flight-related searches. Right now, when you search for [flights from London to Barcelona] Google links to services like Expedia, Orbitz or Kayak. The OneBox is useful, but it doesn't show a list of flights.

After acquiring ITA Software, Google has access to a lot more information about flights and no longer have to send users to services like Expedia. Google can even provide information when you enter a vague query like [flights to Barcelona].

Here's the experimental flight OneBox, as spotted by Richard from SEO Gadget:

When you click "expand all non-stop routes to Barcelona", Google shows a very long list of cities. It's probably the biggest and most overwhelming Google OneBox. Maybe a drop-down would've been more useful.

After selecting one of the cities, Google sends you to a new search results page that shows a long list of flights.

It's nice to have all this information at your fingertips, but it's too overwhelming and these kinds of details aren't suited for an OneBox. Richard also noticed that "you get to data, with no call to action. I think this means most folks would be forced to repeat their search again on a flight provider."

Hopefully, Google will launch a Flight Search service that will also include the brilliant visualizations developed by ITA Software and the OneBox will just be a gateway to the new service.

Update: The feature is now available to everyone. "With the close of our ITA acquisition last month, we're eager to begin developing new flight search tools to make it easier for you to plan a trip. While this flight schedule feature does not currently use ITA's search technology, this is just a small step towards making richer travel information easier to find, and we hope to make finding flights online feel so easy, it'll feel like... well, a vacation," explains Google.

{ Thanks, Richard. }

Monday, May 23, 2011

Music Album Filtering in Google Video

Google started to learn more about music. After improving the Web search results for music videos by adding metadata, Google added the same enhancements to Google Video. Now you can even find a list of popular albums when you search for an artist. Select one of the albums and you'll restrict the results to the songs from the album. The nice thing is that Google's algorithms make sure that the results are diverse and songs aren't repeated too often.

Saturday, May 21, 2011

Google Business Profiles?

The source code of the Google Profiles page includes a broken link that has a revealing anchor text: "business profiles". The link sends you to a page that doesn't exist: http://www.google.com/_/managepages, but this feature could add Google Profiles to Google Apps and allow users to create multiple profile pages.

Another interesting thing is that Google has a new subdomain: https://plusone.google.com, which redirects to Google Profiles. There's already a Web page about the +1 button, so it's not clear why Google has a new address for Google +1. Maybe profiles will be a feature of Google +1.

{ Thanks, Florian. }

How Google Docs Killed GDrive

"In The Plex", Steven Levy's recently launched book about Google, has an interesting story about GDrive, an online storage service developed by Google. People first found about GDrive from a leaked Google document, back in 2006. GDrive (or Platypus) turned out to be a service used by Google employees that offered many impressive features: syncing files, viewing files on the Web, shared spaces for collaborating on a document, offline access, local IO speeds. But Google wanted to launch GDrive for everyone.

At the time [2008], Google was about to launch a project it had been developing for more than a year, a free cloud-based storage service called GDrive. But Sundar [Pichai] had concluded that it was an artifact of the style of computing that Google was about to usher out the door. He went to Bradley Horowitz, the executive in charge of the project, and said, "I don't think we need GDrive anymore." Horowitz asked why not. "Files are so 1990," said Pichai. "I don't think we need files anymore."

Horowitz was stunned. "Not need files anymore?"

"Think about it," said Pichai. "You just want to get information into the cloud. When people use our Google Docs, there are no more files. You just start editing in the cloud, and there's never a file."

When Pichai first proposed this concept to Google's top executives at a GPS—no files!—the reaction was, he says, "skeptical." [Linus] Upson had another characterization: "It was a withering assault." But eventually they won people over by a logical argument—that it could be done, that it was the cloudlike thing to do, that it was the Google thing to do. That was the end of GDrive: shuttered as a relic of antiquated thinking even before Google released it. The engineers working on it went to the Chrome team.

In 2009, Google Docs started to store PDF files and one year later you could store any type of file in Google Docs. The service still doesn't offer a way to sync files. Even if GDrive was never released, Google Docs inherits most of its features. The main difference is that you no longer have to worry about file formats because you can open and edit documents in Google Docs.

{ Thanks, Kristian. }

More Features in Google Maps for Mobile Browsers

One of the most underrated Google mobile Web apps is Google Maps. Most smartphones and tablets have a native app for Google Maps, so a mobile Web app doesn't seem necessary. Unfortunately, native apps aren't always updated frequently and there are many missing features. Google does a good job at updating Google Maps for Android, but Apple's Maps app for iOS rarely includes new Google Maps features.

That's probably one of the reasons why the Google Maps mobile site was updated to include most of the features from the desktop site. Another reason is that Google wants to offer "a consistent Google Maps experience wherever you use it."

The updated Google Maps mobile site has features like local business search, Google Places, driving directions, layers, My Maps, starred locations, search suggestions. If you can't find biking directions or information about businesses in the Maps app for the iPhone, you can go to maps.google.com in your mobile browser and use these features.

Just like the mobile YouTube site, "Google Maps for mobile browsers is platform independent - you will always get a consistent experience and the latest features without needing to install any updates, no matter what phone you use."

I've tried the updated mobile interface on an iPhone 3GS, a Nexus One and an iPad 2. While all the new features are great, the site is still too slow and unresponsive to be useful. Until Google solves performance issues and mobile browsers become more powerful, people will still use the native app.

Google's Black Navigation Bar

For some reason, the navigation bar displayed at the top of Google's "connected accounts" page is special. The bar has a black background and grey links. Hopefully, this is just a bug and not a redesigned navigation bar.

The "connected accounts" page lets you add accounts from services like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Yelp and use them to personalize search results. This way, you can include your accounts from other social sites without adding them to your Google Profile.

{ Thanks, Herin. }

Friday, May 20, 2011

Google Image Search in SSL

Probably the most important missing feature in Google SSL Search was image search. Now this feature is available, but there's a drawback: the page that shows a bigger image preview doesn't use SSL.

Google's encrypted flavor supports most of the features of the regular Google site. The left side of the navigation bar is still missing, you can't use Google Instant and the Wonder Wheel, but hopefully these features will be added in the near future.

Google Chrome has recently implemented a feature called SSL False Start which "reduces the latency of a SSL handshake by 30%". SSL sites load slower and one of the reasons is that SSL handshakes are more CPU intensive, use more network round-trips and more packets.

Google eBooks Integrates with Google Dictionary, Google Translate and Google Search

Google's eBook Reader for the Web added a contextual menu that lets you define, translate and search for a selected word or text. "To select text in a Google eBook within the Web Reader, double-click or highlight it with your mouse and a pop-up menu opens with the following options: Define, Translate, Search Book, Search Google and Search Wikipedia," explains the Google Books blog.

Definitions are obtained from Google Dictionary, while translation is powered by Google Translate. If you click "Search Book", Google shows a list of all the instances in which the selected text appears in the book.

These features aren't available yet in the Google Books apps for Android and iPhone.

7 Google Features Only Available in Google Chrome

Google Chrome is at the forefront of the new technologies and Google services are the first to use them. Here are some examples of features only available in Google Chrome:

1. Native printing in Google Docs. You no longer have to download PDF files and use Adobe Reader or a similar PDF reader to print documents. Google implemented a W3C working draft from 2006.

2. Uploading folders in Google Docs. While you can install a Java applet in other browsers to upload folders, Chrome is the only browser that supports this feature natively.

3. Voice Input in Google Translate. The latest Chrome version supports the HTML Speech API, which provides speech recognition and input to web pages. The first Google service that supports this feature is Google Translate, but it's also tested for Google Web Search. Instead of typing your query or the text you want to translate, you can speak into your computer's microphone.

4 & 5. Desktop notifications in Gmail and Google Calendar. It's a really useful feature that replaces the annoying pop-up notification in Google Calendar and shows an unobtrusive notification when you receive a new message.

6. Open PDF attachments in Gmail using the built-in PDF reader, instead of Google Docs Viewer. It's not clear why Google doesn't detect Adobe Reader's plug-in to use a more full-featured PDF reader.

7. Drag and drop Gmail attachments to your desktop. Instead of clicking the "download" link, you can drag the file icon to your desktop.

Thursday, May 19, 2011

Google Maps OneBox Outlines

Google's OneBox displayed when you search for the name of a country, a city or a zip code got smarter. Google added an outline around the location you want to find, so the map is even more useful. For example, try searching for [Bronx], [Detroit 48238], [Baku], [Paraguay map].

Chris, a reader of this blog, says that he used CityData before noticing the new Google feature. While CityData is only useful for the US, the Google Maps OneBox is displayed for almost any city in the world.

{ via Search Engine Land. Thanks, Chris. }

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Gmail's New Ad System

I've previously reported about Gmail's experiments with image ads and personalized ads, but it seems that these tests are two pieces from a puzzle: a new ad-matching system for Gmail.

New York Times reports that the new algorithms try to find better ads. "Alex Gawley, Google's senior product manager overseeing Gmail, (...) said Gmail's revamped ad-matching system, now in limited tests, analyzes context as well as the content of an individual message. It looks at what he calls 'signals in your inbox,' like whether you open messages with particular keywords and don't open those with other keywords."

Gmail will also include static image ads. "For example, an e-mailed offer for a ski package showing a skier on the slopes could be accompanied by an ad on the right side of the screen, showing a competing offer, replete with another skier coming down another slope. Mr. Gawley said the image used in the ad would be static, not animated, and would be used only in cases where the e-mail message itself showed images."

Gmail's new ads will still be related to your messages, but Google will add other signals that will make the ads an extension of your inbox. Just like Google shows small images ads next to images search results and uses your preferences to personalize ads, Gmail's contextual ads will improve using more data.

As long as the ads are relevant, moderately useful and they aren't distracting, Google is still on the right track. It might take a while to get used to the image ads, but the ad displayed below the messages and the list of messages will be the most obnoxious. "Gmail presents a single text ad when you look at an inbox view and haven't selected a particular message," according to the New York Times.

Pivot Tables in Google Spreadsheets

Google Spreadsheets added an advanced feature that's really useful for summarizing data: pivot tables. "In essence, a pivot table does just that -- it allows you to 'pivot' or rotate data, thus looking at it from different angles and seeing a variety of patterns which may not be immediately obvious," explains Google Docs blog.

A pivot table is a powerful reporting tool that lets you group, filter, sort, count data. Google has an example of spreadsheet that includes information about some students, but it's not easy to summarize the data without using a pivot table. For example, you can group the students from each class level by gender. Just select "Pivot table report" from the "Data" menu, choose the categories of data to include (gender and class level) and the values to summarize ("class level" summarized by "COUNTA").

"A pivot table report is a dynamic table that lets you interpret data in different ways without ever having to enter a formula. Pivot table reports are particularly useful when you want to narrow down a large data set or analyze relationships between data points," suggests Google's help center, which also includes a guide for using this feature.

Monday, May 16, 2011

A New Interface for Google News: No Clusters, No Clutter

Google News has a redesigned interface that tries to remove the visual clutter and make multimedia content more discoverable. All Google News clusters are collapsed by default, except for the top news story. Clusters include more links, a special section for images and videos, but you have to manually expand them.

"The newly expandable stories on Google News in the U.S., released today, give you greater story diversity with less clutter. Now you can easily see more content, see less of what you don't use and have a more streamlined experience," explains Google.

By default, Google uses the single column view, but you can switch to the two column view with the added benefit of going back to the old interface. Here's the new interface:

... and the classic interface:

The redesigned UI shows a single news article instead of a group of related articles. Although the cluster is still available, it's strange to see that Google hides one of the main features of Google News: grouping articles about the same topic. As Krishna Bharat, the founder of Google News, has recently said, the service "groups news articles by story, thus providing visual structure and giving users access to diverse perspectives from around the world in one place".

Power users can try Google's keyboard shortcuts (j/k for navigating to the next/previous story, o/u for expanding/collapsing a story), but most users will rarely expand stories and only click the main news article.

More Google News Settings

Barry Schwartz spotted some new options that let you personalize Google News. If you go to the Google News settings page, you can tweak Google News to show fewer press releases, more blog posts or even hide all the blog posts and press releases. "The neat part of the control of how you see blog and press release results is that there is a lever. You can pick from None to Fewer to Normal to More. Everyone by default is set to normal," says Barry Schwartz.

You can also disable the automatic refresh of the Google News homepage. By default, Google reloads the page every 15 minutes.

I tried to hide all the blog posts and press releases, but this only worked for search results. Google News sections still included blog posts and press releases: