Google Tests Instant Site Search

Google used to show a search box below the top search result, especially for navigational queries like [nytimes], [yahoo] or [newegg]. The search box allowed you to type a new query and restrict the results to that site. Obviously, you can still use the site: operator, but most people don't know about it.

Now Google tests a similar feature as part of Google Instant. After typing a query that has a dominant search result, Google shows a new option: "search within [your query]". Select that option and Google lets you type a new query and restrict the results to that site. It's somewhat similar to Chrome's "tab to search" feature, except that you use Google, not the site's search engine.

It's interesting to notice that Google shows suggestion when you search within a site. If you use the site: operator, Google doesn't show suggestions and the results aren't displayed as you type.

{ via Tecno-Net }

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Find the Best Translation and Improve Google Translate

Google Translate shows a new message at the bottom of the page: "Would you mind answering some questions to help improve translation quality?" It's not a boring survey, it's actually a great way to test your foreign language skills by picking the best translation.

Here's the link, just in case you can't find it. The URL parameters are only for English to French translations, but you can replace "fr" with "es", "de", "it" or other language code.

{ Thanks, Samuel and Camilo. }

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Google Translate Phrasebook

As previously anticipated, Google Translate added a new feature called "phrasebook". It's just a fancy name for bookmarking translations and saving them to a list. You can display the "phrasebook" by clicking the "show phrasebook" button. The list of translations is searchable and can be grouped by language pair. The feature requires to sign in to Google Account so that Google can save the phrasebook.

"Phrasebook for Google Translate jumpstarts this slow learning process by allowing you to save the most useful phrases to you, for easy reference later on, exactly when you need them. By revisiting the useful phrases in your Phrasebook from time to time, you can turn any brief translation into lasting knowledge. It's easy to start using Phrasebook. Simply click the star under the translated text to save the translation in your Phrasebook," explains Google.

Unfortunately, this feature is not very useful to generate phrasebooks because Google Translate doesn't do a good job when it comes to translating short phrases. "You are welcome" is translated "Vous êtes les bienvenus" instead of "Je vous en prie", while "What is your name?" is translated "Quel est votre nom?" instead of the more common "Comment t'appelles-tu?" or "Comment vous appelez-vous?". Not to mention "Mon nom est" instead of "Je m'appelle". Maybe Google should have generated some phrasebooks with common phrases.

{ Thanks, Florian. }

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Larger URLs for Google Search Results

Google emphasizes web addresses displayed below the links to the search results. URLs are a lot larger and are harder to ignore. The "share" link for Google+ is also more visible, although it's still displayed when you mouse over a search result.

Here's a side-by-side comparison with the old interface:

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Google Reader Data Points

It's hard to estimate the number of Google Reader users, but here are some data points:

- the most popular feed has more than 24 million subscribers (CNN):

- the second most popular feed has 6.6 million subscribers (Engadget):

- the third most popular feed has 1.7 million subscribers (NY Times)

- Google's official blog had 100,000 subscribers in 2007 and now it has about 353,000 subscribers

- JoelOnSoftware.com had 42,000 subscribers in 2008 and now it has 148,000 subscribers.

- according to FeedBurner, 87% of the subscribers to this blog's feed use Google Reader or iGoogle. Google Reader says that this blog has 115,035 subscribers, while the total number of subscribers is 144,173. Here are the FeedBurner stats (the green lines show the number of subscribers):

Here's the Google Trends chart for [google reader]:

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No More Google Reader

Google announced that Google Reader will be discontinued on July 1st. It's a sad news, but it was inevitable. Google Reader has always been "on the chopping block" because it never got enough traction.

Everything started with a feed parser built by Chris Wetherell that turned into a feed reader, helped by Ben Darnell, Laurence Gonsalves, and Mihai Parparita. The product was launched in 2005 as a Google Labs project and it was significantly improved one year later, when the Google Reader team launched a completely new version. Over the years, Google Reader integrated with iGoogle, added social features and handled feed serving for all Google products. Back in 2007, Google Reader crawled 8 million feeds and 70% of the traffic was from Firefox users.

In 2011, Google removed Reader's social features and replaced them with a Google +1 button. It was the beginning of the end for Reader, who lost all the engineers from the original team. Google Reader is in maintenance mode ever since then.

While feeds are no longer important for many users and browsers start to drop support for reading feeds, social networks make newsfeeds popular and mobile apps like Flipboard simplify reading the news. Feeds are now a behind-the-scenes technology and full-fledged feed readers seem outdated.

"We know Reader has a devoted following who will be very sad to see it go. We're sad too. There are two simple reasons for this: usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we're pouring all of our energy into fewer products. We think that kind of focus will make for a better user experience," says Google's Alan Green.

It's hard to find a replacement for Google Reader, since Google Reader was the most popular feed reader and the competition couldn't keep up with it. You can still find some web-based feed readers, but none of them is as good as Google Reader. Congratulations to everyone who worked on the Reader team and thanks to all the people who subscribed to this blog in Google Reader.

Here's Google Reader's team from 2007:

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Gray Background in Google Image Search

Google Image Search uses a gray background for almost the entire page. The same background color from the header of most Google services is now used for the list of image search results. It's a light shade of gray and it looks a little better than the white background.

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Gmail's Old Mobile Sites, No Longer Available

Gmail's mobile interface has a link that used to send you to an old version of the interface, launched in 2008. I was curios to see if the "older version" link at the bottom of the page sends you to the interface that has been replaced this week.

It turns out that the older versions of the Gmail mobile site are no longer available and the "older version" link is now less useful because it sends users to the Gmail site for feature phones and for unsupported browsers.

It's also interesting to notice that the "desktop" link loads the basic HTML version, not the regular desktop interface. If you click "standard" in the basic HTML interface, Gmail sends you back to the mobile version. I've only been able to load the standard interface by using Chrome's "request desktop site" feature.

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10 Differences Between Gmail's iOS App and the Mobile Gmail Site

Now that Gmail's iOS app and the mobile Gmail site look almost the same, you may wonder which one is better. Why install the Gmail app when you can use Gmail from Safari, Chrome or any other browser? Here are 10 differences I found:

1. The native app is faster. Almost everything is faster, from transitions to scrolling and loading messages. This is especially noticeable if you have an old iPhone (I've tested the native app and the web app on an iPhone 3GS: the web app was a lot slower).

2. The native app supports push notifications. If you buy a new iPhone or iPad right now, the Gmail app is the only way to receive notifications almost instantly. The Exchange-powered Google Sync is no longer available for new devices (it still works for existing devices and Google Apps for Business/Education).

3. Gmail's iOS app opens links inside the app, while the web app opens links in a new tab. The first approach is better because it's much easier to go back to the message. You can open pages in Chrome from the Gmail app and Chrome adds a new button that sends you back to the Gmail app, replicating an Android feature.

4. You can preview photos before attaching them to a message in the native app, but this feature is not available in the web app. Photos sent using the native app are a lot more compressed: I've sent a screenshot using both apps and the native app attached a 91KB JPG file, while the mobile Gmail site attached a 239KB JPG image.

5. The native app doesn't show Google's navigation menu and doesn't include browser controls, so there's more space for displaying messages.

6. Gmail's iOS app has a different navigation interface borrowed from the YouTube and Google+ apps. It supports gestures, it's faster and it doesn't replace the current view.

7. The native app integrates with your phone contacts. That means you can open the system contact picker when composing a new message.

8. The web app shows status messages at the bottom of the window, while the native app doesn't.

9. The web app asks for permission to increase local storage to 10MB or more, while the native app doesn't.

10. Both apps let you switch between multiple accounts, but the native app has a nicer interface with profile photos and unread mail counter.

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New Mobile Gmail Interface

Gmail's mobile site now looks like the hybrid Gmail app for iPhone and iPad. There are some differences: the app has a sidebar, a different interface for changing accounts and support for push notifications.

Unlike Gmail's app for Android, the iPhone app is just a wrapper for the mobile site with a few extra features. Until now, Gmail's app for iPhone used a different interface than the mobile site. Mobile Gmail had an old interface that predated the Google-wide redesign efforts.

New interface (iPhone 4S) vs the old interface (iPhone 3GS):

Unfortunately, the new mobile site lacks the previous/next buttons, just like the iPhone app. The good news is that you can now upload photos from the mobile site if you have an iPhone or iPod. Until now, the feature was only available in the Android interface and the "native" iOS app.

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Google Now Topics

Update: two days later, it no longer works.

Google Now has a cool feature that shows useful results for the topics you've recently explored using Google Search. Now you can find all the topics if you visit this page. Unfortunately, the links to the topic pages only work from an Android device.

It's likely that Google notices when you're clicking a lot of search results and refine your query multiple times and creates a new topic. Google automatically classifies topics and it lets you filter the topics by time. Google Now Topics could be a modern version of Google Alerts if Google added more notification options.

{ Thanks, Florian. }

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Google Search App for Android Tests New Colors

The Google Search app for Android experiments with a new search results interface that uses soft colors: light blue and orange. Right now, the regular interface uses the same colors like the web search interface: blue (#1122CC) for links and green (#009933) for web addresses.

While it's refreshing to see new colors in the search UI, orange makes URLs stand out too much. Blogger's new interface uses a similar color for headers and important buttons.

Here's the current interface:

{ Thanks, Andrew. }

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Google Support Will Use Hangouts

Google will start to use Google+ Hangouts to provide support. The screensharing feature is especially useful because a Google employee can see what's on your computer screen, so you don't have to take screenshots.

Here's the text used by the screensharing feature:

"Would you like to share your screen with Google? By clicking 'Share my screen' button you will enable screensharing. Your microphone and camera will remain off and your computer will be visible to your Google representative. Please make sure you close anything you do not want your representative to see. To turn off screensharing at any time click the 'Stop sharing my screen' button."

It's not clear which Google service will have this option, but the wording suggests it will be limited to businesses that use services like Google+, AdWords and Google Apps.

{ Thanks, Florian. }

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Show the Number of Results When Using Google Search Tools

Google used to display the list of search tools in the left sidebar, below the list of specialized search engines. Now search tools are placed below the search box and use less space. Unfortunately, when you click "search tools" and select one of the features, Google no longer shows the approximate number of search results.

It might not seem obvious, but clicking the "Search tools" button again replaces Google's advanced search options with a line that includes the number of results and the time used by Google to generate the search results page. Clicking "Search tools" doesn't disable the advanced filters, you need to click "clear" to do that.

The number of search results is a very useful information because it shows if there's enough content for your query. If Google only returns 50-100 results, you may need to remove some of the keywords, fix some mistakes, disable some of the filters. It's sad to see that Google no longer displays the number of results in the mobile interface (for both smartphones and tablets) and you need to switch to the "classic" interface to find it.

Obviously, Google can't find the exact number of search results, so it only shows an approximation truncated to the first 3 significant digits, but even this imprecise number is useful.

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Advanced Uses for Google's Site: Operator

You probably know that Google's site: operator lets you restrict results to a site or domain. Search for [site:cnn.com iran] to restrict the results for "Iran" to CNN's site, search for [site:googlesystem.blogspot.com gmail tips] to find Gmail tips from this blog. You can also use the site: operator for top-level domains and search for [site:fr debussy] or [site:edu ai].

Google's site: operator is a lot more powerful than that. You can leave out some components of the address and replace them with asterisks. For example, you can find results from addresses that match this pattern: maps.*.com. Unfortunately, Google doesn't show all the results that match the pattern.

You can also find results that have URLs which start with "news." like "news.cnet.com" or "news.discovery.com". Just search for [site:news.*].

What if you want to search Amazon's international sites? Instead of typing [site:amazon.com OR site:amazon.co.uk OR site:amazon.ca OR site:amazon.de OR site:amazon.fr], just search for [site:amazon.*].

Google's site: operator also works for directories. For example, you can find last year's posts about Gmail by searching for [site:googlesystem.blogspot.com/2012 gmail].

You can even enter URLs that include parameters and leave out the parameters. Here's a way to search the Google Maps help center: [site:support.google.com/maps/bin/answer.py inurl:"hl=en" 3d]. I've used the inurl: operator to restrict the results to English pages, but it's not necessary to do that.

How to restrict the results for [imap] to answers from Google's help centers? Search for: [site:support.google.com/*/answer imap].

These tricks work for image search, as well:

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Change Distance Units in Google Maps for iPhone

The latest version of Google Maps for iOS added a small feature that's really useful: manually changing distance units. Just tap the "people" icon next to the search box, tap the "wheel" icon, go to the "distance units" section and select "miles" or "kilometres".

Until now, the application used the unit that corresponded to the country you've selected in the iPhone's settings (General/International/Regional format). If you've picked "United States", Google Maps only displayed distance information in miles.

Unfortunately, the "regional format" setting affects a lot of features, including the Google URL used by Safari's search box. If you select any other country than the United States, you're always sent to the corresponding international domain.

Google Maps 1.1 for iOS also integrates with Google Contacts and adds a feature that lets you "quickly search for local places by selecting popular categories such as restaurants, bars, cafes, gas stations". Right now, the most important missing feature is the lack of native iPad support.

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The Trouble With Google Drive

When you can use Google Music to store 20000 songs, Google+ Photos to store an unlimited number of photos up to 2048 x 2048 pixels and videos up to 15 minutes, YouTube to store all your videos, Gmail to store 10GB of messages and attachments and when the files converted to the Google Drive formats don't count towards the Google Drive storage, what are the use cases for the Google Drive storage and why would you buy extra storage?

You could use it to store the original photos, PDF files, store documents/spreadsheets/presentations without importing them into Google Docs, backup all your files, but the most popular file types are already covered. Google wanted to encourage people to use Gmail, Google Docs, YouTube, Google Music, Google+ and free storage was an important selling point.

The trouble with Google Drive is that Google has a lot of other services that are better suited for storing your files and Drive doesn't even integrate with those services. When your photos are in Google+ Photos, your videos are uploaded to YouTube and your music is in Google Music, Google Drive feels like an afterthought, not the "go-to place" for uploading your files.

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Try Chrome's Data Compression Proxy

The latest version of Chrome Beta for Android added the experimental data compression feature. It's not enabled by default, but here's how you can try this feature:

1. open a new tab, type chrome://flags in the address bar and tap "Go"

2. tap "Enable" next to the "data compression proxy" experiment (it's the first one right now)

3. tap "Relaunch now"

After relaunching the browser, you can see how much data you've saved by opening a new tab, typing chrome://net-internals and selecting the "Bandwidth" section in the left sidebar. Then visit different sites in a different tab and check the stats.

Google's proxy is faster than Opera Mobile's Turbo feature, while saving almost the same amount of data. For example, the savings for AnandTech.com were 48.9%, while Opera Mobile Turbo's data savings were 50%. The savings for apple.com were 60.3%, while Opera Mobile Turbo's data savings were 57%. Chrome's major advantage is that the proxy doesn't slow down browsing, unlike Opera Mobile.

	Chrome	Opera Mobile
anandtech.com	48.9%	50%
apple.com	60.3%	57%
amazon.com (mobile)	20%	18%
m.stanford.edu	40%	27%
googleblog.blogspot.com (desktop)	5.4%	28%

Google says that "this feature has been shown to reduce data usage by 50% and speed up page load times on cellular networks. When the Data Compression Proxy feature is enabled, Chrome mobile opens a dedicated SPDY connection between your phone and one of the optimization servers running in Google's datacenters and relays all HTTP requests over this connection. (...) The browser-to-proxy connection runs over SSL, meaning that your browsing session is encrypted between your device and Google's servers." HTTPS connections and pages loaded in the incognito mode don't use the proxy. DNS lookups are performed by the proxy, while the images are converted to WebP and the resulting images are up to 80% smaller. "The proxy also performs intelligent compression and minification of HTML, JavaScript and CSS resources, which removes unnecessary whitespace, comments, and other metadata which are not essential to render the page. These optimizations, combined with mandatory gzip compression for all resources, can result in substantial bandwidth savings."

{ via Chromium blog }

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Picasa Web Albums Redirects to Google+ Photos

After replacing Picasa Web with Google+ Photos in the navigation bar and redirecting individual albums to the Google+ interface, now Google redirects picasaweb.google.com to the albums section of Google+ Photos. You can still go back to the old Picasa Web interface if you use this URL: https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/myphotos?noredirect=1. Google displays this URL in a message that says: "Click here to go back to Picasa Web Albums".

When you use that URL, Google also sets a cookie value that prevents the redirect to Google+ Photos even when you enter picasaweb.google.com in the address bar.

Google+ Photos has constantly improved last year, while Picasa Web Albums no longer added new features. It's obvious that Google+ Photos is an upgraded version of Picasa Web Albums, which will be discontinued in the future. There are still a lot of cool Picasa Web features that haven't been added to Google+ Photos (Creative Commons licensing, photo mapping, featured photos, search), so let's hope that Google won't retire Picasa Web Albums until Google+ Photos adds these features.

{ Thanks, Dave and Eric. }

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Gmail's Account Activity Reveals More Information

Gmail's account activity is a very useful security feature that offers information about the clients that connected to your email account recently, including the IP addresses and the date.

Until now, Google only displayed generic information about the access type (browser, mobile, POP3). A recent updated added some new details: the browser's name and the user agent. If you click "show details", you can find more information from the user agent: the browser's version and the operating system. Obviously, the browser's user agent can be easily spoofed.

{ Thanks, Herin. }

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Change the Default Country Code in Gmail

Gmail has a new setting that lets you change the default country code for phone numbers. Google already detected the country, but you can now manually change it.

The default country code is used by Gmail's contact manager. If a phone number doesn't include a country code, Gmail uses the code you've selected.

{ Thanks, Scott and Herin. }

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"Try These Too" in Google Image Search

Google Image Search has a new feature that shows a list of 7 related images when you select a result. The section is called "try these too" and is a clever way to integrate the similar images feature. Click one of the related images and it will replace the original result. The first image from the list is always the original search result, so you can always go back to that image.

If you want to find a more comprehensive list of similar images, click "more sizes", then click the "More sizes" dropdown and select "Visually similar".

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Chrome for Android Travels in Time

Speaking of Chrome for Android, there's a milestone that needs to be mentioned: it's the first time when the latest stable version of Chrome for Android matches the desktop Chrome.

You've probably noticed that Chrome for Android has always been a few months behind the desktop Chrome and the delay has continually increased. Chrome 18, the previous stable version, corresponds to the desktop version released in March 2012. That's one year of performance improvements, bug fixes, new HTML5 features, new WebKit and V8 releases. It's like using a completely new browser or travelling in time and skipping 6 Chrome versions.

Chrome for Android has a great interface and cutting-edge syncing features, but it was slower than the stock browser, buggy and used a lot of resources. Google addressed some of these issues, so let's hope that Chrome for Android will start to push the boundaries when it comes to speed, without neglecting the constraints of the mobile devices.

"Chrome for Android has been developed in a separate repository as a fork, which means that most of the code will have to be upstreamed," mentioned Peter Beverloo last year, when Chrome for Android was launched. "Of course, bringing a browser to a different - much more limited - platform goes further than simply re-using code. Mobile devices have a lot of limitations compared to desktop and laptop machines. Besides the lower amount of available memory and CPU power, other constraints lie in less memory bandwidth and VRAM on the device's GPU. Google Chrome has a complicated architecture which imposed some interesting challenges here: separating the browser from the renderers through its multiple process architecture, to name an example. Decreased rendering and scrolling performance were also an issue."

{ Image licensed as Creative Commons Attribution by CityGypsy11. }

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Chrome for Android to Add Web Accelerator

I've always wondered when the Google Web Accelerator project will be resurrected. Now that Google has both a mobile operating system and a browser, it makes sense to find better ways to speed up browsing. A fast browser is not very useful if you have a slow Internet connection or you're limited to a few hundred megabytes a month. That's why browsers like Opera Mini and Opera Mobile are popular. Amazon Silk for Kindle Fire even uses Google's SPDY to make browsing faster.

Chrome for Android will add an experimental feature that uses Google's servers to compress pages. The purpose is to "reduce data consumption by loading optimized web pages via Google proxy servers." For the moment, it's just another option added to the chrome://flags page. You'll probably find it in the next releases of Chrome Beta for Android.

{ via François }

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Google's Mobile Image Search Adds Infinite Scrolling

I'm not sure if this is an experiment or a feature that's currently rolled out. Google Image Search for mobile has a new interface that replaces pagination with infinite scrolling, just like the desktop interface. You can see a lot more images without having to swipe and it's much easier to find great search results. Another difference is that thumbnails no longer have the same size.

Google also added an option to "scroll to top", but this is more useful if you use Android. iOS has a built-in feature that scrolls to the top of the page (or the current view) when you tap the status bar.

When you select an image result, you'll probably see a new interface that focuses on the image and makes it more obvious that you can swipe right/left to check to other results. The browser's address bar is no longer displayed and the image is slightly smaller.

Unfortunately, just like the new desktop image search, the redesigned mobile interface replaces snippets with page titles and removes file sizes (in bytes, not pixels). The most important missing feature is the link to the full-size image. The image is actually loaded in the background and replaces Google's thumbnail, so you can still long press the image and use browser features that let you save the image or open it in a new tab.

Here's the old interface:

And here's a side-by-side comparison (old vs new):

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