Google Indexes Images a Lot Faster

Google Image Search used to have an index that wasn't updated too often. At some point, Google started to include images from Google News articles, so you could find images from recent events.



Now Google Image Search's index updates in real-time for many pages, just like the Web Search index. A few minutes after publishing a post, I was really surprised to see that an image from the post was already indexed by Google.





A search for [cartoon] restricted to the past hour returns 41 images and not all of them are from news articles and blog posts. Google Image Search still doesn't index all the images as soon as the pages are indexed by Google, but the improvements are noticeable.

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Slide's Apps to Be Discontinued

One year ago, Google acquired Slide, a company that developed third-party apps for Facebook and other social networks. At that time, Google mentioned that the goal was to "make Google services socially aware". Slide continued to operate as an independent start-up inside Google and developed photo sharing apps like Photovine and Pool Party. Slide's CEO, Max Levchin, became VP of engineering at Google.



New York Times reports that Max Levchin will leave Google and most of the Slide apps will be discontinued. A Slide blog post confirms that "in the coming months, a number of Slide's products and applications will be retired. This includes Slide's products such as Slideshow and SuperPoke! Pets, as well as more recent products such as Photovine, Video Inbox and Pool Party." Slide's team says that "many of these products are no longer as active or haven't caught on as we originally hoped".





A Google spokesperson informed the New York Times that most of the Slide team will continue to work at Google and many engineers will join YouTube. If Slide was a talent acquisition, then why Slide's team didn't work on Google+ and why popular games like SuperPoke weren't ported to Google+?



AllThingsD offers some answers: "Although Slide as an independent start-up had not matched its lofty expectations and valuations — at as much as $500 million in a 2008 funding round — its acquisition brought Google some key assets: Social Web expertise at a time when it was dearly needed, and Levchin, who famously founded PayPal. But that was last August. Since then, Google has entrusted its social efforts to two of its existing executives, Vic Gundotra and Bradley Horowitz, who led the team that created Google+. Levchin was left on the fringes with Slide as an autonomous subsidiary, reporting to Google co-founder Sergey Brin."

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Google Calendar Grays Out Old Events

Google Calendar found a way to separate old events from upcoming events: old events are now grayed out. The interface also grays out future recurring events because it's likely that they're less important (this was an experimental feature in Google Calendar Labs).





If you don't like the new features, it's easy to disable them: go to the "Options" menu from Google Calendar's navigation bar, select "Calendar settings", go to the "Event dimming" section and disable these two options: "Dim past events" and "Dim recurring future events".





Google says that the brightness of these events is reduced "so you can focus on today", although you'll be able to better focus on the future, as well.



{ Thanks, Cougar. }

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Google Sets Will Be Shut Down

Google Sets, one of my favorite Google Labs experiments, will be shut down on September 5, just like Google Squared. Launched in 2002, Google Sets is the only experiment from the early days of Google Labs that's still available, even though it hasn't graduated.

The great thing about Google Sets is that it only did one thing and did it very well: automatically generating lists from a few examples. Google Sets used the explicit and implicit lists from the pages indexed by Google and tried to find the lists that were relevant to the examples entered by users. For example, you could enter "Honda" and "Toyota" and Google Sets returned a long list of car brands.



The patent filed in 2003 explains that, at that time, there wasn't any "mechanism for quickly and efficiently generating lists of items given one or more example". Web pages included a lot of lists: some of them were created using special HTML tags (<ul>, <ol>, document headers), others used tables, while most of them were items separated by commas or tabs. The patent was filed by Simon Tong, a researcher who contributed to Google's ranking algorithm, designed AdSense's targeting algorithm and Gmail's spam detection's learning algorithm, and Jeff Dean, who designed Google's crawling, indexing, and query serving systems, BigTable and MapReduce, the initial version of Google's advertising serving system and a lot more.

Google Sets was the building block for Google Squared, a service that generated lists and information about the items. If you type "dogs" in Google Squared, you'll see a list of dog breeds, related images, descriptions, the size and the country of origin. The list of dog breeds is now also displayed at the bottom of Google's results page for [dogs]. The attributes aren't yet available in Google Search, but this feature will probably added in the future.


While Google Sets and Google Squared will no longer be available, they're still used in Google Search to better understand the content of a page and to provide lists of related searches.

Update: Google Sets is still available as a Google Spreadsheets feature.

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Creating a Google Account Requires to Enter Your Birthday

Last year, I reported that creating a Google account requires entering your birthday if you are in the US. It seems that this requirement is no longer limited to the US and changing your location can't be used as a workaround.





If you're younger than 13 years old and you enter your real birthday, you'll see this message: "Google could not create your account. In order to have a Google Account, you must meet certain age requirements. To learn more about online child safety, visit the Federal Trade Commission's website."





Children's Online Privacy Protection Act makes it difficult to collect personal information from children under 13, so that's probably the reason why Google decided to prevent these users to create an account. For example, Google would have to "obtain verifiable parental consent from the child's parent." That's not the case when your school created a Google Apps account for you, since the school has to obtain parental consent.



It's interesting that you can't edit your birthday from your account and that Google deletes the accounts of the children under 13, unless they provide a way to show that the birthday is incorrect. From Google's FAQ:

You can re-enable your account by following our instructions to confirm that you are old enough to have a Google Account. You will see these instructions when you attempt to sign back in to your account. We currently offer two ways to confirm your age:



1. Sending in a signed form via mail or fax with a copy of your current, government-issued ID showing your date of birth, or

2. Performing a small transaction ($0.30 USD) on a valid credit card.

Creating a Google account is more and more complicated. Sometimes Google will ask to enter your phone number in order to confirm that you're actually a human (and not a bot) and now you also need to enter your birthday. Some services require to create a Google Profile and if you want to use Google+, you need to use your real name or "the name your friends, family or co-workers usually call you". If something goes wrong, you'll have to prove that it's your name.



{ Thanks, Herin. }

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Lists in Google Snippets

I've mentioned two weeks ago that Google started to label pages that include search results. For some of these pages, Google's snippets now use lists, so you can distinguish between separate items. These snippets are twice as big as the regular snippets (4 lines vs 2 lines) and they include useful information like prices or dates.





Sometimes Google is confused and shows similar snippets for blogs, especially if homepages look like search results pages.





Google's snippets usually include one or more excerpts from the page that include some of your keywords and are separated by ellipses.



Update: It's official. "If a search result consists mostly of a structured list, like a table or series of bullets, we'll show a list of three relevant rows or items underneath the result in a bulleted format. The snippet will also show an approximate count of the total number of rows or items on the page," explains Google.

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Short URLs, Back in Google Maps

After a brief disappearance, short URLs are back in Google Maps. This was one of the most popular experiment from Google Maps Labs and it's now a standard feature. Just click the link button next to the search box and click the "short URL" checkbox. The new short URLs use g.co, a domain recently acquired by Google. All the URLs that start with "http://g.co" send you to Google domains, while http://goo.gl/ continues to be a public URL shortener.





Google Maps is the service that generates very long URLs with many unnecessary parameters, so the short URLs are useful not just for posting a Twitter message or sending a text message, but also for writing an email, a comment on a blog post or for adding a Google Maps URL to a document. Google Maps also needs to automatically change the URL from the address bar, so that you don't have to use the permalink button.



{ via Google LatLong }

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Music Rich Snippets in Google Search

Last week, Google announced a new flavor of rich snippets, this time for music pages. At that time, I couldn't see the new snippets, but now they should be available for everyone.





"With this new feature, site owners can mark up their pages using the newly created music markup spec on schema.org, and search results for that site may start displaying song information in the snippet so that users know that there are songs or samples there for them to listen to. Several initial partners have implemented the music markup on their sites, including MySpace, Rhapsody and ReverbNation," explained Google.



The new rich snippets include links to music pages that could be found by visiting the search result, but it's faster to bypass the search result and start to play a song. It's important to mention that the songs aren't played on Google's results pages, so you still need to go to a different page. You'll only see the music rich snippets when your query includes the name of an artist, a song or an album.



Google also shows rich snippets for events, profile pages, recipes, videos, reviews and products. "With rich snippets, webmasters with sites containing structured content—such as review sites or business listings—can label their content to make it clear that each labeled piece of text represents a certain type of data: for example, a restaurant name, an address, or a rating."



At some point, Google will make structured data searchable and it will be a lot easier to refine results. Recipe search already lets you do that and it's pretty useful.

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How to Try Google's Cleaner Interface

I mentioned in the previous post that Google tests a less cluttered interface and there's now a way to try it. Techno-Net noticed that you can change the NID value of a Google cookie and get the same interface.







Here's how to do this in Chrome:



1. Install "Edit this Cookie", a cookie manager for Chrome.



2. Go to Google's homepage and click the yellow cookie icon from Chrome's toolbar.



3. Find the line that starts with NID, click it, select the value (Ctrl-A or Command-A for Mac), delete it, paste the following value (use Ctrl-V or Command-V for Mac) and click "Submit cookie changes":



50=RbHwrmdgEAl6v3XPDKfJey5zpW7n84oRvsTZOK0LuYwW0m0UDFcPmts2HqKaZc2-Rdo7iLsrYKOUVKV4ztyb7JMDWavDVmvsyC2UldBcyFKsmyM_4Qhr761WpGHfoZPZ





Here are the instructions for Firefox:



1. Install Cookies Manager+ and restart the browser.



2. Go to Google's homepage.



3. Press Alt-T and select "Cookies Manager+". You'll also find the option in the "Web Developer" item of Firefox's unified menu.



4. Search for google.com and find the entry named "NID". If you're not in the US and you use a different Google domain, search for your domain (for example: google.co.uk in the UK).



5. Click "edit" and replace the content with:



50=RbHwrmdgEAl6v3XPDKfJey5zpW7n84oRvsTZOK0LuYwW0m0UDFcPmts2HqKaZc2-Rdo7iLsrYKOUVKV4ztyb7JMDWavDVmvsyC2UldBcyFKsmyM_4Qhr761WpGHfoZPZ





Opera already has a cookie manager that lets you edit cookie values. You only need to go to Google's homepage, right-click on the page, select "Edit site preferences", go to the "Cookies" tab and edit the item that starts with "NID".



I couldn't find some great cookie managers that worked in the latest versions of Internet Explorer and Safari, but the instructions should be similar.



Sharing the "NID" value allows other people to try an experimental Google interface. The next time when you find an interface that looks different and you send a tip to gostips@gmail.com, you can also include the NID value of your Google cookie.



If Google constantly changes the "NID" value and you can't use the experimental interface for too long, delete your Google cookies and start again. What if you don't like the interface and you want to go back to the regular UI? Just remove the "NID" key or delete its value using the cookie manager.

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Google Tests a Cleaner Interface

Google started to test a variation of the search interface I mentioned the last month. The experimental interface removes all the icons from the sidebar and the icons for Google +1 and Instant Preview, which are displayed next to the results.





When you mouse over a search result, Google shows a bigger Instant Preview icon in a vertical bar. Mouse over the bar, and you'll a large screenshot of the page, the links to the cached paged and other similar pages and the Google +1 button.





Like the previous variation of the experiment, Google's header and the search options sidebar are sticky, so you'll see them even if you scroll down. It's the perfect interface for implementing infinite scrolling, which is also tested in a separate experiment.







{ Thanks, Herin. }

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Google Chrome Adds Support for Native Client Apps

Almost three years after its announcement, Native Client is almost ready for prime time. It's enabled in Chrome 14, which is now in beta and will reach the stable channel in less than a month.



Native Client is a very complex framework that allows browsers to run native compiled code in a sandbox. Google's goal is to "maintain the OS portability and safety that people expect from web apps", while allowing developers to use their preferred language. Right now, the only supported languages are C and C++ and Native Client only works in Chrome for Windows, Mac and Linux.



"Native Client apps live on the web platform, so you don't need to create separate versions of your app for each operating system. Rather than relying on OS-specific APIs, Native Client apps use Pepper, a set of interfaces that provide C and C++ bindings to the capabilities of HTML5. This means that once you've ported your code to Native Client, it will work across different operating systems, and you only need to maintain one code base. Today Native Client supports the Pepper APIs for 2D graphics, stereo audio, URL fetching, sandboxed local file access (File API), and asynchronous message passing to and from JavaScript. In future releases we will be adding support for hardware accelerated 3D graphics (OpenGL ES 2.0), fullscreen mode, networking (WebSockets and peer-to-peer connections), and much more," informs Google.



Google announced that developers will be able to upload their native apps to the Chrome Web Store once Chrome 14 hits the stable channel. In the meantime, Chrome 14 users can try the examples from this gallery: a pi generator, a sine wave synthesizer and John Conway's Game of Life.





NaCl (Native Client) + Pepper -> a lot of games, business apps, educational apps, image editors and virtual machine software running inside your browser. Suddenly, Chromebooks are no longer that limited.

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Audio Pronunciation in Google Search

Google added a new feature to the dictionary OneBox: audio pronunciation. This feature was available if you clicked "More" to read all the definitions, but now it's more accessible.





Google uses Flash to play the audio file, so the feature doesn't work if you disable Flash. It's interesting that Google shows the audio icon if you use an iPad, even though the device doesn't let you install the Flash plugin. The HTML5 audio tag is a better option for iOS devices and for the browsers that support it.

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Weather Layer in Google Maps

Google Maps added a layer for weather. Just mouse over the satellite box and select "weather" from the list of layers.



"When zoomed out, you'll see a map with current weather conditions from U.S. Naval Research Lab. And, if you look closely, you can also tell if it's day or night around the world by sun and moon icons. Enabling the weather layer also gives you an instant weather report for friends and family living around the world," informs Google. Weather reports are powered by weather.com and include information about the current conditions (humidity, wind speed, temperature) and a 4-day forecast.







The nice thing about Google Maps layers is that you can combine them. For example, you can enable both the terrain and the weather layers, like you can see in the screenshot above.

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Google Tests Infinite Scrolling for Search Results Pages

After testing a persistent header, Google continues to experiment with infinite scrolling for Google search results. A Webmaster World user spotted a new box that replaces the standard pagination links: "show more results". When you click the message, Google loads the second page of results below the top results.





Barry Schwartz says that Google tested a similar interface back in June. I remember that SearchMash, Google's old playground for search experiments, used infinite scrolling in the first iterations. Last year, Google Image Search added infinite scrolling,



There are many extensions that add infinite scrolling to Google search results pages. One of the best is AutoPager, which is available for Firefox and Chrome.

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Gmail's Newest/Oldest Pagination Features

The latest Gmail design refresh replaced pagination links with arrow buttons. Even if it's not obvious, the navigation links that sent you to the newest/oldest messages are still available in the new interface. Just click the message similar to "11-20 of 3903" from the screenshot below and you'll see the two options that appeared to be missing.





This works for Gmail's search results and when you click one of the labels. For example, you can go to the "All Mail" system label, click the pagination message, select "Oldest" and find the first messages from your Gmail account.



For the search terms that return a lot of results, the only pagination feature that works is "newest" because Gmail shows vague estimations for the number of results like "1-20 of hundreds" or "1-20 of thousands" and it can't determine the last page of results.



{ Thanks, jpp. }

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