GOOGLE SYSTEM: June 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.