Google's Expanded Sitelinks

After a few months of testing bigger sitelinks, Google launched the new feature. Sitelinks are displayed below some of the results and they're usually related pages from the same site. "The links (...) are meant to help users navigate your site. Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they're looking for," explains Google.



Until now, Google displayed up to 8 sitelinks and only included page titles. The updated sitelinks look like regular results, since Google also shows small snippets and their URLs. Google now shows up to 12 expanded sitelinks, but you'll still see the regular sitelinks for some of the results. I think that Google shows too many sitelinks, the snippets aren't useful because they're too short and the titles are good enough.







Google still shows compact sitelinks for YouTube and Amazon:







Barry Schwartz thinks that the new "jumbo" sitelinks "take up most of the Google's search results real estate. Good for online reputation management, but not too great for others who want to rank well for those brand names."



Unfortunately, they take up a lot of space without offering too much value. While it's useful to see links for Apple Support and iTunes when you search for [Apple], some people might want to read Apple news or Wikipedia's article about Apple and they have to scroll down to realize that there are results from other domains than apple.com. The new sitelinks partly address the problem created last year, when Google decided to show a large number of results from a domain "for queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain". The expanded sitelinks combine the old sitelinks with the other results from the same site, while removing the overlapping results.

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Google Highlights Pages that Include Search Results

Some think that search engines shouldn't index pages that include search results. Why clutter the results with pages that show another list of results when you could send users to the most relevant pages?



In some cases, search results pages are useful, but it's a good idea to know in advance that a page only includes search results. Google started to show a label like "Matches 1-50 of 100", "Results 1-24 of 56" or "33 results" next to the snippets. For example, an Amazon page that includes a list of Star Wars-related products shows this label.





Another example is a store that sells games:

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New Ways to Access Your Bookmarks in Google Chrome

The latest Chrome Dev Channel builds removed the bookmarks bar from the new tab page and updated the new tab page to include a bookmarks section. Right now, Chrome only shows a placeholder: "Bookmarks coming soon", but this should change in the upcoming releases. The updated new tab page now includes multiple screens for apps, most visited pages and bookmarks.





Until the bookmarks section is created, you can find your bookmarks in Chrome's menu.





There's also the bookmarks manager and the Omnibox, which suggests relevant bookmarks when you start typing a URL or some words from the title. You can still enable the bookmarks bar (Ctrl+Shift+B), but it will always be visible until you disable it.



Chrome's updated new tab page is inspired by mobile operating systems like iOS and Android. You can create multiple screens for apps and the most visited sites, remove sites and apps by dragging them to the trash and transform sites into apps using drag and drop. The new tab page uses dynamic icons that are resized to match the window's size.





{ Thanks, Cougar. }

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What's Next for Google Labs Projects?

There are three kinds of Google Labs projects: those that will continue to exist as standalone products, those that will become features and those that will be discontinued. Google Labs will no longer exist and it's sad to see so many useful services disappear.



Google Scribe will continue to exist as a Blogger feature, but you'll only find it in Blogger in Draft right now. Scribe will probably be added to Google Docs, Gmail and other Google services.





Google Squared will be discontinued next month, but the technology will continue to be used in Google Search. "As part of phasing out of Google Labs, Google Squared will be shut down on September 5, 2011. Any saved Squares will be deleted. We will continue to use Google Squared technology to improve search, as we have already done with question answering and related searches. We hope that you have enjoyed using Google Squared as much as we enjoyed building it," explains Google.



Another cool service that will be shut down is Image Swirl, a clever way to organize image search results and find related images. "We will continue research on innovative methods to organize and navigate images as part of Google Images," promises Google.





App Inventor, the service that allowed you to quickly build simple Android apps, will be discontinued as a Google product and will be open sourced. "Because of App Inventor's success in the education space, we are exploring opportunities to support the educational use of App Inventor on an open source platform. As a result of these changes App Inventor will be available through the end of the year but users should expect the current App Inventor URL, appinventor.googlelabs.com, to change sometime in the next 90 days."



Google will also close Script Converter ("a product that allows the user to read a web page in a script of their choice"), Google Talk Guru (a chat bot that answered simple questions), Breadcrumb ("an easy-to-use mobile learning application without any programming experience") and Sputnik ("a JavaScript conformance test suite").



Google still has to decide if Code Search, Google Mars, Google Sets, Google Moderator, Shared Spaces, Aardvark, Google Body, Google Correlate, Google Transliterate or City Tours will continue to exist. I suspect that most services will disappear or they'll be open sourced.



Google Labs was the place where you could find small tools that solved interesting problems. Google Sets will never be a full-fledged Google service, but it's a very useful tool for generating lists of words from a category. While the Google Sets technology will continue to be used in Google Search, it's likely that Google Sets will no longer exist.



"At Google, we believe in launching early and often and Labs takes that philosophy to the max. The projects in Labs are intended to showcase some of our cool and wacky ideas but are not intended to be full-blown Google products. Labs experiments may be unavailable or be even removed without notice and you may not be able to access any of your data. We recommend that you not use sensitive information in a Labs experiment. Google Labs is our playground. We try to keep it safe and orderly, but still keep it informal and, above all, fun." (Google Labs FAQ)



Google will continue to launch experimental features, like Hotel Finder, but they'll be integrated into bigger services instead of stagnating in Google Labs.

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Show Fewer Gmail Conversations

If you've ever wanted to see less than 25 conversations on a page in Gmail, you'll be glad to know that it's now possible to do that. Just go to Gmail's settings page and select 10, 15 or 20 from the drop-down "Show [x] conversations per page". Until now, the only options were 25, 50 and 100.





The new options are useful if you don't receive too many messages or if you want to improve Gmail's performance. Gmail loads a lot faster if it only has to fetch 10 conversations instead of 25.





{ Thanks, Herin. }

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Chromebooks Could Automatically Delete User Data

The latest Chrome for Chrome OS Dev Channel release (14.0.835.87) added a warning at the bottom of the file manager which informs users that "these files are temporary and may be automatically deleted to free up disk space".



The warning links to a page that provides more details: "Your browsing data is automatically deleted if your Chromebook is running low on space. If additional space is needed, non-owner profiles that have not been accessed for more than 3 months may be erased (including downloaded files)."





In Chrome OS, the owner is the first user who logged in using a Google account. He's the only user who can restrict sign-in access or switch to the beta/dev channels. Regular users don't have these permissions, but they can save files. Google's warning informs users that these files are temporary and they could be automatically deleted if the accounts are rarely used. Google recommends users to upload the files to Google Docs or another "web-based storage application", but it would be a much better idea to add a new feature that automatically saves files to Google Docs.



Chromebooks include a 16GB SSD that's mostly used to store system files and cached user files. User data is encrypted and some of the data is automatically synchronized (preferences, bookmarks, extensions, apps, passwords). To reclaim disk space, Chrome OS can always delete discardable data like browser cache, so it's unlikely that important user files are removed first.



{ Thanks, Cougar. }

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Google's Experimental Sign-in Pages

It's probably the first time when Google tests a new sign-in page by asking users to try it. If you go to Gmail and you aren't logged in, you should see a message at the bottom of the page: "Coming soon: A new sign-in page! Preview it." When you click "Preview it", you'll see a new sign-in page that uses the Google+ design.





If you opt-in to the new interface, the sign-in pages for Google Docs, Google Reader and all the other Google services will also change. "For a limited time, you can switch back to the old version of the sign-in page by clicking the link at the bottom of the page. However, eventually this change will be permanent and you will not be able to switch to the old look," informs Google.





For reference, here's the soon-to-be-deprecated interface:





The new input boxes are a lot bigger: you can type 31 characters in the username box and they're still visible. In the old interface, only 20 characters from the username were visible at a time.



{ Thanks, Herin and Evan. }

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Google+ Games

6 weeks after the Google+ launch, the project received a major upgrade and added social games. "Games in Google+ are there when you want them and gone when you don't. When you're ready to play, the Games page is waiting — click the games button at the top of your stream. You can see the latest game updates from your circles, browse the invites you've received and check out games that people you know have played recently. The Games page is also where your game accomplishments will appear."





The nice thing is that game updates don't clutter your main stream, but this also means that the stream will no longer be comprehensive and it will be difficult for a game to become popular in a short amount of time.



For now, there's a small number of games from companies like Zynga, Rovio (Angry Birds), PopCap Games and it's interesting to see that the games APIs aren't publicly available. "We chose to start with a small number of partners so that we could experiment, get the kinks out of our APIs, and get real end-user feedback before opening up to the world. (...) Because we want to provide both a great user experience and a great developer experience, we're focusing on quality before quantity. We will continue to add new partners and new features in small steps, starting with today's release of the games APIs to a small number of developers," explains Google.



Games aren't available to all Google+ users because the feature is slowly rolled out. When you see a new tab at the top of the page, next to the search box, you should be able to play games.







Google+ games are social. When you play a game, you can share updates with your circles, buy virtual goods, send gifts, invite your friends. "Additionally, a game may involve multiple players in a single match (such as a poker table). In these situations, the other players in the room can see and interact with each other during gameplay. Some games allow you to partner up with (or work against) another player, such as a neighbor, ally, or an enemy/rival. These games use your circles to suggest people to interact with. You could show up as a suggestion to another player to become an ally or to challenge," mentions Google.



Forbes reports that Google charges a 5% fee to developers for virtual goods transactions. "With this much lower fee to attract developers, Google is going after Facebook, which takes a 30% cut from developers for using its required Facebook Credits virtual currency system."

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No More Standalone Google Dictionary

Google Dictionary is no longer available as a standalone service at google.com/dictionary. You can still find it in Google Web Search and Google Translate. For example, you can search for [define keyword] and click "more" or search for [keyword] and click "Dictionary" in the search options sidebar.


{ Thanks, Arpit. }

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Google Docs Tests New Interface

Google Docs has a new interface inspired by Google+ and you can try it here. The interface is cleaner and there's a lot of white space. You'll also find the familiar red buttons, the gray buttons, the new scrollbars and the labelless search button.

The new interface looks better, but there's a lot of white space that could be used to show more information about the files. The details view is no longer available from the interface, but you can enable it in the old UI and the setting is preserved.


{ Thanks, Petros. }

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Chrome 13

Google released the first stable Chrome 13 build a week later than originally planned. Chrome 13 brings print preview for Windows and Linux, page prerendering and partial URL matching in the address bar.

Print preview uses the built-in PDF viewer, so it only works if you use the default settings and you haven't enabled Adobe Reader's plugin. Unlike other browsers, Chrome doesn't have a separate menu item for print preview and there's no modal window. When you click "Print", Chrome opens a new tab that shows the page converted to PDF and a small number of options for printing. For more advanced options, click "advanced" to open the native printing dialog.

Since Chrome automatically generates a PDF file, you can easily save it by selecting "Print to PDF" from the "Destination" drop-down.


Prerendering extends an old Firefox feature called prefetching. Instead of only loading the HTML code of a page, prerendering loads the page and all the associated resources (images, scripts, CSS files), while also running the active content. This is useful if it's very likely that the visitor of a page will go to another page and it makes sense to load the second page in the background. Google is the first site that uses prerendering. It loads the top search result if it's very likely that users will click it (e.g.: for navigational queries like [CNN], [Princeton]). Any developer can use prerendering by adding rel="prerender" to a link tag, but it should be used sparingly.

Another new Chrome feature improves the address bar by adding support for partial URL matches in your browser history. This means that you can type "web" in the address bar and Chrome will match "http://picasaweb.google.com" if you've previously visited the page, just like in Firefox. "The omnibox, Chrome's combination search box and address bar, has gotten much smarter in the latest release, making it even easier for you to get back to pages you've visited before. Just type part of the page's address or title and look in the dropdown for matching pages from your history," explains Google.

Chrome 13 is special because Google offered "$17,000 of rewards" to the security experts who found vulnerabilities in Chrome's code. This is "possibly the best haul yet," mentions Google.

{ Thanks, Gal. }

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Rate Google Translations

Google Translate has a new feature that allows users to improve translation quality: rating translations. There are three options: helpful, not helpful and offensive, but Google doesn't let you highlight the text that's poorly translated.


Another way to improve Google Translate is to click a word from the translated text and choose one of the alternate translations. You can also enter a better translation or hold down the shift key and drag the words to reorder them.

While Google Translate supports 64 languages, you probably use it for a small number of language pairs. That's the reason why Google highlights the languages you've recently selected.


{ Thanks, Charlie. }

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Goodbye, Google Friends!

Google Friends is Google's monthly newsletter that included the latest announcements and product releases. 13 years after the first newsletter issue, Google announced that Google Friends will be retired.

It's hard to believe, but this monthly missive is now 13 years old. We hope you've enjoyed reading it over time, and wanted you to know that we are retiring it in its current form.

As you may know, the Google Friends Newsletter was created by Larry Page in April 1998, when Google was still on Stanford servers. In the early days, the Friends notes offered newsy details like "We are gearing up to do another crawl. We should start within a few weeks" and tips on tweaking your search queries.

Obviously a lot has happened since then, including changes in how we communicate updates to all of you. So this will be our last Google Friends Newsletter. We started the Official Google Blog in 2004 and joined Twitter in 2009, and we've seen dramatic growth on those channels. Meanwhile, the number of subscribers to this newsletter has remained flat, so we've concluded that this format is no longer the best way for us to get the word out about new Google products and services.

Google Friends started as an eGroups mailing list, then it became a Yahoo Group and was later moved to Google Groups. "We used the company eGroups to mass-mail our Google Friends newsletter to users, because Larry's brother, Carl, was one of eGroups founders. Larry had done the configuration for the original eGroups server himself, and for a while the company's computational heart has lived under his desk. The same week we announced our deal with Yahoo, Yahoo announced they were buying eGroups for $428 million (Yahoo has been very kind to the Page family)," remembers the former Google marketing director Douglas Edwards.

The early issues of the newsletter include a geek-friendly changelog of Google's search engine. You'll find about the long-gone operator flink: (forward links), the PageRank bar displayed next to each search result and Google's plans to "have a much bigger index than our current 24 million pages".

"After combining our web server and search engine for better performance, we have been experiencing intermittent problems with our system being down for short amounts of time fairly frequently. If you have trouble getting to the system, try back in a minute or two, and it should be back up." (July 1998)

This is a paragraph you'll never find in a Google blog post, Twitter message or a recent Google Friends issue.

{ Thanks, Tomi. }

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Templates for Google Contacts

Gmail added a new feature that makes it easier to add a new contact: templates. If you click "More actions" when you create a contact or edit an existing one, you can select the business template to quickly add fields for the job title, company name, mobile phone and work phone.


The default template is more generic:


Google Contacts lets you add or delete fields, but you can't delete the fields from a template. Hopefully, Google will allow users to create custom templates and import some of the data from Google Profiles.

{ Thanks, Herin. }

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Google Related

Google Toolbar 7.1 for Internet Explorer has a new feature that shows Web pages, news articles, places, images and videos related to the current page. The feature is called Google Related and it's a bar displayed at the bottom of the page.

"Google Related is a browsing assistant that offers interesting and useful content while you are browsing the web. For instance, if you're browsing a page about a restaurant in San Francisco, Google Related will assist you by displaying useful information about this restaurant such as the location of the restaurant on a map, user reviews, related restaurants in the area, and other webpages related to San Francisco restaurants - all in one place," explains Google.


If you go to the Wikipedia article about Adele, Google Related shows 5 YouTube videos, 5 articles from Google News and 5 pages from Google Search.


Google Related is another feature that requires sending the list of all the pages you visit to Google's servers. To find related pages, Google needs to know the URL of the page you're visiting. The so-called "enhanced features" (PageRank, SideWiki, Google Related) send Google a lot of useful data. One of the most interesting ways to use the data is a feature that shows if a site is slow. Like all the other Google Toolbar "enhanced features", Google Related can be disabled from the "Options" dialog by clicking the "Privacy" tab.


Apparently, Google Related only works if you've configured the toolbar's search site to be Google.com (United States of America - .com), so you may need to change this setting to enable Google Related.

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